Bridge Maintenance
by CrossesWithHonor
Summary: Sequel to 'Bridge Building', set a little over one year later. Some forces on Earth want out of the League. Admiral Thenuwara watches over the creation of what's intended to be the first of the SLN's modern wall of battle. Rivendell has some new toys from their friends on Manticore and is building more. None of this makes the Mesan Alignment very happy.
1. Prologue, June, 1924 PD

This is a sequel to my previous story 'Bridge Building', and you really should read that first. As with that story, this story is in sync with canon up to _Mission of Honor_, lightly AU up to _Cauldron of Ghosts_, and almost certainly will diverge somewhat from future books. Events in this story start a bit over one year after the conclusion of both _Bridge Building_ and _Cauldron of Ghosts_. I'd guess at least one Honorverse novel will take place between the end of my previous story and the start of this one. The structure of the Sol System Government that unfolds as part of this story is entirely my own invention and has no basis in any of Weber's text.

The Honorverse belongs to David Weber. I'm just playing with it for a bit.

**Prologue: June 1924 PD**

_Sol System, Solarian League Navy Fleet Headquarters_

"So how fares your project?" Fleet Admiral Kingsford asked. He hadn't wanted to pull Thenuwara away from that project for the time it took to Sol and back, but he could hardly go out to Sanderson himself, and the SLN's newest five-star Admiral was one of the very few people he could count on to tell the truth to him.

"General Industries' people are just about ready to lay down the first hulls of their updated design. And they're projecting a build time of thirty months." By the standards of any SLN yard, that was a breakneck pace. "They've also prepared some paper studies that might be worth further development, if we have the budget for them."

"Will we be able to meet the Manties on anything like an even basis with them?"

"Perhaps with enough of them, but the more important fact is that someone with technological parity with the Manites could not hold them off with light units. The first proposal is one to basically convert a _Scientist_ or _Vega_ into an optimized missile pod carrier, and along the way update everything that's practical to update. It would cost almost as much as building a new SD(P) from scratch, and be even less capable than the Sanderson Navy's original design… but it could be done in 18 months, given the yard space to build it. The second is an SD(P) design that, like what we're laying down in the yards we captured from the Princedom, is based on their SD(P) design, but this one is intended to use as many components as possible from existing stores and/or dismantling the reserve fleet. Again, less capable, but they believe it can be built in 24 months instead of 30.

"On the other hand, what we're laying down now at Sanderson is considerably more capable than the PSN built; we're using the best hardware available in the League, whether or not the Navy used it previously, as well as quite a few R&amp;D products from General Industries. All things being equal, the Princedom's design needed a 2:1 advantage over Rivendell's _Aes Sedai_ DN(P) for an even fight. We're projecting that the upgrades we can make – mostly in electronics – could cut that to 3:2. Of course, the elves have probably incorporated some Manticoran technology into the last two flights of _Aes Sedai_, and certainly have in all the new construction they're building – mostly for their alliance partners. And one of the changes GIT's people made was to try and design things to be upgraded, and in anticipation of eventually reverse-engineering Manticoran developments. GIT's people have also designed in bays for two enormous remote platforms because the Manticorans pod SDs do; the platforms we're currently proposing those spaces now are loaded with fire control and point defense but we think the Manty version enabled that FTL fire control system of theirs. Which we're nowhere near matching. We do have a hand-built, experimental system that fits in a LAC, but GIT says volume production is a long way off."

"So what you're telling me is you have some ideas for stop gaps that won't be good enough and would require us throwing money and people at to build enough to matter, and the best GIT can do right now won't be ready for another two and a half years at best and is still significantly inferior to what Manticore already has deployed. And you want to go ahead and build that anyway, and keep R&amp;D and construction isolated out at Sanderson. Does that some things up?"

"Yes. I'm not sure of the merits of either of GIT's expedient class proposals, but I am convinced that it's time to start laying down our first hulls. And until we get to the bottom of this Mesan conspiracy of the Manties, I'm convinced we need to do our R&amp;D and construction somewhere as far from prying eyes as possible. GIT is convinced the improved versions of the PSN's missiles they've come up with are already better than Technodyne's, and I'd prefer that they stay proprietary to the SLN."

[break]

_Sol System, Thenuwara family estate_

Admiral Thenuwara had avoided visiting the family compound on her last trip to Earth. She'd only been in-system long enough to report to Kingsford, and speak briefly with the people putting together the civilian experts that would be following her shortly. After passing through the tightest security screening any civilian in the SLN's employee had ever had. Finding good and loyal people who had to agree to none but highly censored communications outside the Sanderson system and to stay out there for five years, even if they would be able to bring their families with them and be very well compensated financially for the task, was difficult. But General Industries of Terra was a huge transstellar corporation; there were enough of them that fit the bill.

Speaking with her father was not something she was looking forward to. He was a hundred and fifteen years old, and had retired from the SLN as a Fleet Admiral when it became clear he would never get a clear shot at the Battle Fleet CO's job, or the overall command of the Navy that almost always followed. Three of the four before Rampajet had been from the Thenuwara family, and the other old fleet families had been concerned they were becoming too powerful. Choosing Rampajet instead of her father had still been a mistake, even if she likely would not have had a much freer rein with her father in the CNO's office.

"Thank you for coming." He said.

"Do I have you to thank for my fifth star?" She normally had more tact than that.

"I may have suggested that it looked bad for the only admiral in Battle Fleet who has won a battle recently to remain a four-star. I did not campaign for it."

"I can live with that."

"Most of the family was not convinced of the merits of your… project… until very recently, but we did not see any harm in it. I, for one, was not convinced of the immediacy of the problem until the Tiberian incident." Four of the SLN's _Gladiator_-class heavy cruisers had been destroyed by a single Manticoran CA there, and even considering the low quality of the 'pirate' crews and that they lacked the first-line SLN upgrades… that indicated serious deficiencies in the SLN's warships. Indira had strongly suspected Manticore's first line hardware had outclassed the SLN's for twenty years at that point, but that was the first demonstration of the disparities in real combat.

"That was five years ago, father."

"I could see no way to make any significant improvements in the resources available to 34th Fleet without drawing the wrong kind of attention. Accusations that a handful of old Fleet families were building their own private Navy would only make your job harder."

"You did not ask me here to apologize."

"No. You have two openings for a Vice-Admiral. I want you to take Rajiv for one of them."

Misaki Oshigiri had earned a long-deserved promotion to full Admiral and was her wall of battle commander now. And as Indira had suspected would happen, Adrienne Brock had resigned from the SLN to become the senior field commander of the Heimdall Self-Defense Force. Brock wasn't the first SLN flag officer – or even starship commander – to make a similar move in the last year. Caitlin Michaels at Rivendell had been the most spectacular – bringing an entire Frontier Fleet detachment with her, and Luis Rozack the boldest (given that the legal rights of protectorate worlds like those in the Maya Sector to secede were… unclear at best), but the scores of other, smaller-scale defections (whether their new employers had officially left the League yet or not) added yet another problem to the many the SLN was facing. It wasn't a problem she'd failed to anticipate; Indira had drawn her people in 34th Fleet from worlds that could be expected to stick with Sol to the bitter end and people who could be expected to stick with her where the former could not be found. Brock had not been an old hand with 34th Fleet despite in most ways being someone Indira would have wanted to recruit; she had been one of the squadron commanders for the two squadrons attached to her regular fleet when she was sent out to do something about Sanderson's raids on Solarian League protectorates and the Rivendell Republic making off with an entire SLN Frontier Fleet detachment in the process of seceding. But Adrienne Brock was from Heimdall, and her people had been almost certain Heimdall would not stay with Sol if the League splintered, and they had been correct.

Her nephew was more than capable, but he had never shown the signs of discontent with Battle Fleet's standard operating procedures that she looked for in people she brought into her fleet. Which was perhaps why he was already a Vice-Admiral despite being over thirty years her junior. And he would certainly tell his grandfather anything of consequence that happened with her fleet.

"He'd be my most junior squadron commander. And reporting directly to Misaki, not to me. I'd have to give him Brock's squadron; none of the old 34th Fleet squadrons would work with a commander brought in from the outside right away. And I don't know how much longer the Manties will let us use their wormhole to send dispatch boats back to Sanderson."

"I think you misunderstand. Leaving an observer with your fleet is not the primary reason why I would ask that Rajiv accompany it." He was careful not to say _spy_. "But it would be a good idea to signal to the rest of the fleet that you have my complete support."

She could live with that. And finding a better vice-admiral than her nephew on short notice would be difficult. Oshigiri's replacement would be trickier; she had not misled her father on that. If Madison Keeley had declined Admiral Michaels' offer, the Commodore could perhaps have taken over for Yao on her staff while he moved to field command. Granted, transferring someone that senior from Frontier Fleet to Battle Fleet was all but unheard of, but Michaels' chief of staff had impressed her. As it was, the most capable senior person she'd 'appropriated' from the former Rivendell Sector Frontier Fleet detachment was Captain Eric Grant, who'd also been on Michaels' staff – the line captains having all been part of the Rivendell Sector's change of allegiance. Which meant somewhat more shuffling, but ended up with another one of her old hands as a squadron commander.

"I will take him, then. And father – I'm not entirely sure earth is much safer than a fleet command for someone like us these days. So be careful."


	2. August, 1924 PD

I've decided to publish this story in larger chapters than my last one. With 'Bridge Building', I wrote the whole story before publishing any of it, and I didn't really realize until breaking it up into files along the chapter lines I'd set that some chapters were considerably longer than others. That still might happen, but I'm going for a longer lower bound this time.

**August 1924 PD**

_Sanderson System, aboard Admiral Thenuwara's flagship (formerly the _PSN Brandon IV Sanderson_)_

Indira Thenuwara was not entirely sure how the email had made it through the SLN's security software. It certainly should not have. It could not have left earth much after she did, and it was very uncertain how long the temporary, regional, and personal truce that let her take the fastest route back from Sol to her fleet would hold. Certainly the last SLN Fleet Admiral attempting to transit from Beowulf to Manticore had not been allowed to do so, though a dispatch boat was somewhat less hostile than a hundred or so of the wall. She had transited from Beowulf to Manticore to the Lynx terminus system without incident, and from the Spindle terminus system to the Rivendell terminus system without incident as well. She would have thought that, and the distances involved for a trip from Sol to Sanderson without using the Manticoran wormhole junction, would have kept disturbing email from catching up to her. She was incorrect.

"He's being circumspect, but the chairman of the Solarian Independence Party seems to be offering me command of the Sol System Navy." She told her chief of staff.

"Since Sol has no independent navy the last time I checked, and its self-defense force lacks a wall of battle – perfectly reasonable given how much of Battle Fleet is home ported there – that would seem to be difficult for him to offer. Even if the SIP controlled the Sol System government, which it does not." Rear Admiral Yao Wen said. His second star was as new as his CO's fifth, and before Sanderson, neither had expected promotion any time soon. The notion that Battle Fleet ought to spent most of its efforts actually preparing to fight had not been popular until recently, which explained why a Thenuwara with Indira's seventy years in uniform lacked a fifth star, and a Wen with Yao's sixty had been a mere Commodore.

Ten years ago the SIP was a fringe radical party no one took seriously. Now, they had ten percent of the members in the lower house of the Sol System Parlaiment, where members were allocated by proportional voting by party. In the upper house, where members had to contest districts individually, the SIP only had a handful of representatives, mostly from Belter communities. But they were growing fast; if current trends continued, the next round of elections would likely give one of the two traditional major parties the difficult choice of allying with its traditional rival or the SIP in order to form a government. And they wanted no part of the Solarian League.

What Thenuwara – and the Marine Intelligence she relied on for political assessments, Battle Fleet's official intelligence data being somewhat useless – did not know was how real the SIP was. The growing hostility to the League they had tapped into was a very real sentiment. But whether that sentiment had been created and nurtured deliberately by the conspiracy the Manties and their friends were calling the Mesan Alignment was something she could only guess at. If the SIP were legitimate reformers, and actually seceded from the League, Thenuwara and the rest of 34th Fleet would have a difficult decision to make.

"If this is not a setup, I'd like to know why he thought I could be sympathetic. SLN personnel records are not public information, and no one outside of 34th Fleet's squadron commanders and my staff should be aware of my thinking on certain… long-term problems. And Jared, of course." She said. And her father, but a leak there seemed even less likely than from one of her staff.

Jared Richt's Frontier Fleet Task Force 1321, home-ported a scant sixty light-years from earth, was a rather important part of her planning, given that Battle Fleet maintained far too few organic escorts for proper screen and scouting roles. If Thenuwara was lucky, no one was aware that they had any connection at all prior to being assigned the task of rolling back Harriet II Sanderson's conquest of a handful of OFS Protectorates near the Rivendell Sector. That Richt had been maneuvering core worlders serving in Frontier Fleet with talent and the right attitude into Task Force 1321 as long as she'd been doing the same with Battle Fleet's 34th Fleet. That they had been friends since attending the most exclusive of the SLN's many military prep schools was something very, very few remembered. When she'd selected Task Force 1321 s to accompany 34th Fleet to Rivendell and Sanderson, no one had remarked on it, at any rate.

"Get a message back to him. Be even more circumspect, but tell him that right now he has nothing to offer. If he truly has a command to give, then we might be able to discuss things."

[break]

Rajiv Thenuwara had been given a full official briefing on his new assignment by Admiral Kingsford, informally briefed by his grandfather, and his aunt had even spoken to him in person before they left earth. Nonetheless, there had been things she did not tell him until a few days after they passed through the Spindle-Rivendell wormhole bridge and were in space that was not claimed by the fledgling Rivendell Republic or the Star Empire of Manticore. Most notably, somehow the 28 captured SD(P)s from the Princedom of Sanderson Navy seemed to have acquired Solarian crews.

He hadn't expected that. Under normal circumstances, operating a captured ship could be a logistical nightmare. Even if the tech base it had been built from was basically similar, a fair amount of refit was needed just to ensure software compatibility and the ability to share consumables like missiles and counter-missiles. That was the nominal reason why GIT had spent a year studying and updating the PSN's designs before laying down what were intended to be the SLN's first SD(P)s. However, the logistical problems were nowhere near as bad in this case, as the SLN had not merely captured the ships – his aunt (and her allies, but they'd left administering Sanderson to the League) had captured the yard complex where they were built, too. And as crude as the _Prince of Sanderson_-class SD(P)s were in a lot of ways, they were still far more capable combatants than the _Vegas_ and _Scientists_ that were the backbone of Battle Fleet.

He'd asked his aunt where she found the crews for them, but it was obvious. Eight of her SD(P)s had been knocked out of the battle of Sanderson. Eight others had remained combat-capable but sustained heavy damage. The members of Rivendell's Frontier Fleet detachment who had not wanted to take service with the Rivendell Republic. And careful raiding of the rest of the fleet for officers had supplied the rest. He wouldn't be commanding any of the PSN ships, though, just what used to be Adrienne Brock's squadron. His aunt had stripped two of his division commanders to man the captured ships – a quick check showed everyone in the fleet was operating with four-ship divisions. She could have brought more officers with them from Sol, but Rajiv was sure his aunt had her reasons.

[break]

_Osgiliath orbit,_ _Rivendell System, General Dynamics of Rivendell shipyard complex_

General Dynamics' people hated to admit it, but the advisors the Manticorans had sent helped a lot. The first eighteen of Rivendell's _Aes Sedai_ class DN(P)s had outclassed any waller not built by the Manticoran Alliance in most respects. The third and fourth flights, which had incorporated substantial Alliance technology in their last year (or last two years, in the fourth flight's case) of construction, were very nearly ton for ton matches to anything Manticore had built. Designing the Dreamwalker II platforms had been the most difficult part of the upgrades their new allies had engineered; Rivendell's DN(P) design had no room for a single platform the size of Keyhole II, but failing to upgrade the last two flights of _Aes Sedai_ to be able to handle Apollo would have seemed a poor trade off to the people who were being asked to build the Grand Alliance's missiles. Oh, they had still gone ahead with the new lines at Beowulf and San Martin and were even beginning to build one out at Bolthole, but General Dynamics' lines at Rivendell had been far closer to ready when the project had begun – Rivendell's Callandor missile was rather closer to a Mark 23 than anything anyone else had – and General Dynamics was already producing the full spectrum of Manticoran missile designs in volume while the other lines were still ramping up.

Some of Admiral Michaels' people weren't happy with the new pods. Trading twelve Callandor missiles for seven Mark 23s and one Apollo control missile hurt offensive missile capacity a lot; Rivendell's standard missile pod design was smaller than the RMN's, and the eight in the RMN's 'flatpack' design simply would not fit in an _Aes Sedai_'s rails. Fortunately, there was no technical reason an Apollo control missile couldn't handle nine or even ten missiles, so one of the five pod rails of a Flight III _Aes Sedai_ held pods with 10 Mark 23s and no control missile. And she was convinced that the proponents of sticking with the RN's own missiles didn't fully appreciate how effective Apollo's FTL fire control was.

The last flight of _Aes Sedai_ were not the most impressive ships in General Dynamics' yards, though. The only six _Asha'man_ class SD(P)s that would ever be built were not either; like the Aes Sedai they were largely scaled-up versions of, they were not designed to accommodate something like Keyhole II, so they would use the same Dreamwalker II platforms the last two flights of _Aes Sedai_ used. And in new dispersed building slips cluttering the orbit of Osgiliath (largest moon of the Rivendell system's lone gas giant), over a dozen more SD(P)s were in the earliest stages of construction.

In the Rivendell Navy's service, they had been designated the _Allomancer_ class, but in truth they were a very lightly modified version of the Grayson Navy's _Harrington II_ class (the most important change was leaving space for an oversized hyper generator, on the assumption that the Mesan 'streak drive' would be reverse engineered). Manticore had designated the variant as an _Invictus-B_, and it was as yet unclear what Haven and Beowulf would call them. No matter what they were called, they would be the most powerful conventional warships in space when completed. It wasn't entirely clear who would be the final owners of all the SD(P)s that were being built in Rivendell's yards, but they were building a lot of them, and not just at Rivendell.

Admiral Michaels didn't get out to the yard complex very often. Her normal duty station was her desk in Rivendell Navy Headquarters. Taking almost half of the Rivendell Navy's wall of battle out under her personal command last year had been well outside her normal job description, but there had not been anyone else she trusted to do it at the time. Now, Wes Marrone was back – albeit in command of the Grand Alliance Rivendell Task Force, not the Rivendell Navy's Home Fleet. And after a month as a prisoner of the Princedom of Sanderson and six months of rehab, so was Steve Carroll.

"I'm sorry you're stuck with the first two flights of _Aes Sedai_ in Home Fleet." She told Admiral Carroll. "But eventually we're going to find out where the rats fled Mesa for. And if that's closer to us than to Manticore, Wes is going after them. "

"It makes sense. Wes' task force – fleet, really – seems to be where our Grand Alliance is figuring out how to do joint operations. And everyone seems in a hurry to get their latest and greatest out here. Haven swapped out their original squadron for one of the first out of Bolthole designed to pick up Keyhole II modules from Beowulf, and another with the same specs is here flying Beowulf colors. The Graysons sent two more carriers. We even have a squadron of 'Erewhonese' light cruisers here making a 'courtesy call' – they're really Maya Sector, and really assigned to Wes' fleet, of course."

"Still, I'm glad to have you back even if I couldn't give you our nicest toys. I can't think of anyone better to give Home Fleet to." She told him. There had always been the worry that whoever got the Chief of Naval Operations job immediately after White City would be a partisan of his or her former service, whether that was the Rivendell Navy or the Rivendell Sector Detachment of the SLN's Frontier Fleet. But in the year and a half since Michaels had been in command of both services, she had largely managed to avoid it. True, her senior staff were mostly drawn from her former staff in the SLN, and the officers commanding the Rivendell Navy's ships of the wall – and squadrons thereof – were largely drawn from the Rivendell Navy. But that only made sense; anyone in Michaels' job would want her own people for most of her staff, and it was hardly possible to get experience commanding ships of the wall in Frontier Fleet. She'd taken personal command of some of the Rivendell Navy's wall last year, but that had been an extraordinary circumstance she had no intention of repeating.

She had been glad to see Carroll, and to review the new construction, but that wasn't truly why she'd come out here. There was one more thing she wanted to get a look at in person before heading back to headquarters. One of the Marines standing guard on the door was a Rivendell Navy lifer, and even a Ranger and she had the lithe, deadly grace that all of them did. The Republic had never had any large ground combat arms, but its Marines knew the work and the Rangers tried their very best to be worthy of their namesake. The other was a loner from Manticore whose credentials, she understood, were just as impressive. But he was really there because he could talk to the third guard. She understood why there was a Sphinxian treecat guarding that door, but there weren't any nonhuman sentient beings native to any of the Republic's five worlds. Certainly not furry, six-legged telepathic ones.

The 'cat's hands flashed.

"Far Strider thinks you're really you, Admiral. So you're clear to go in."

"Wouldn't it be fairly simple to rig up a sign to speech translation device?" She asked.

"And once someone thought of that, they made a killing selling them back on Sphinx. However, most of us two-legs don't understand sign language, and that clever little guy over there sometimes would like to get a message to me that an enemy probably wouldn't understand."

The cat's true-hands signed again.

"He says it's not his fault two-legs are mind-blind." And they let her into what was quite possibly the most secure facility in the Grand Alliance, with the possible exception of Bolthole.

"Good afternoon, Admiral." Dr. Kara Fey said. "Welcome to project Parker."

"When I saw you'd been assigned to head this project, I thought I'd misread. Aren't you a specialist on wormhole junctions?"

"It's more of sideline – which is true of just about anyone in the Republic who studies them at all. Until last year we didn't have one of our own, which made research difficult. I knew more than almost anyone else on Rivendell on the subject, but my real expertise is in detecting unusual hyperspace phenomena."

"And you had something to show me?"

"It's purely in models right now, but if they're accurate – both of how the Mesan's stealth drive system works and of how our toys should work – then we may have at least a little bit of spider-sense soon."

Project Parker had two goals, both considered absolutely critical by the Grand Alliance. The first was discovering how the 'spider' drive worked, and the second was figuring out how to detect a ship using it (and the best possible stealth technology). Given the elves' proclivities, the project inevitably got named after the Spider-Man.

It wasn't the only project to develop a means of detecting the spider drive. A fairly large project at Bolthole had the same aim. But that project was based on trying to detect things that any ship should have regardless of its drive source – effects based on visible light or heat for the most part. Given the FTL capability of Alliance recon drones, there was an argument that the approach Bolthole was taking would be good enough if it worked. But Michaels, like most of the combat-experienced officers who'd considered the problem of the spider drive, believed it would be far more difficult to hunt down spider drive ships if some kind of gravitic signature from them could not be found.

Dr. Fey started running her simulation, and the electronic model of a conventional recon drone showed nothing of consequence despite being right in the simulated path of her simulated spider-drive ship. But the model of her team's new sensor… that showed something.

"We should have test bed physical models built in a month." She said. "And then we'll be sure that this is something, not just numbers in a computer. Even that won't confirm we've reverse-engineered the 'spider drive' properly; we've taken the general principles that Dr. Simões outlined and come up with a way that could work, but it's not definite that it's the same way the Mesan drive does. My team and I are convinced it's close enough, though."

[break]

_Darius System_

Albrecht Detweiller was not happy with the reports in front of him. The League was collapsing, Manticore's industrial plant was a smoldering ruin they were nowhere near close to rebuilding, and almost all of the Alignment's top people had safely evacuated Mesa. But too much had gone wrong in unanticipated ways.

"All our analysts are saying Thenuwara and Rivendell are going to be even bigger problems than we had guessed last year." He said. "On one hand, an independent Sol with a navy led by Thenuwara's people and possessing adequate hardware is going to make rolling the League up into the Factor very difficult. On the other, we expected if Rivendell wasn't taken down a peg they'd become a troubling second-tier nexus opposed to us. We did not anticipate them becoming almost as important as Haven and Beowulf in supplying the so-called Grand Alliance with things Manticore can't build right now."

"So I suppose it's good that I have a plan for doing something about that problem, then?" His son Colin asked.

"Only if it's a good one."

When Colin explained, his father agreed. It could work, and the riskiest parts would not risk anyone important. So he approved it. Colin neglected to mention that he'd already begun.


	3. September, 1924 PD

**September 1924 PD**

_Solarian Independence Party Headquarters, Luna, Sol System_

"You'll lose a lot of our most dedicated supporters if you do this." Kevin Diaz' chief of staff told him. Zara was very good at her job; she'd gone from being an unpaid volunteer to Kevin's chief of staff in less than three years, and in that time the party had gone from a lunatic fringe organization to a minor party with representation in both houses of the Sol System government. Part of that rise was the appeal of an anti-League message in these times. Part of it was Kevin's natural charisma and political acumen. But a lot of it was Zara's talent for organization, even if she was a touch more radical than Kevin would like. Ex-Manpower slaves tended to be, even if they were not inclined to join the Ballroom.

"If we and the other independence movements can work out an agreement in principle for a new multi-system entity among the deep core worlds, we'll gain far more support than we'll lose. Besides, it's what I've been aiming for all along."

"You didn't let that stop you from putting up 'Sol for the Solarians' banners running up to the last election."

"I didn't think anyone else was ready to leave the League yet. Except Beowulf, and talking to them would have been political suicide then. Or Rivendell, and they're much too far away to be of any use to us."

"You're the boss." She said. "But don't say I didn't warn you if this crashes and burns."

[break]

_A small café near Solarian Independence Party Headquarters, Luna, Sol System_

"He's going to do exactly what we want." Zara told her colleague. "He's more idealistic than almost anyone in politics in the Sol system, but he still has the basic instinct to run the other way when a starry-eyed radical suggests a direction. Still, aren't you worried he might actually pull it off? If the elections were held today, he'd control the balance of power, and the leadership of the Alliance for Freedom and One Sol have loathed each other for half a century. Beyond that, a lot of trans-stellars are sending money their way."

The Alliance for Freedom and One Sol had both been radical new parties once, but for nearly a century they had been the dominant parties of the 'right' and 'left' in the Sol System government. Until recently, they'd controlled over eighty percent of the electorate between the two of them, with various minor parties making up the rest. Diaz' SIP had snatched ten percent in the last round of elections, and seemed certain to at least double that in the next.

And while none of the huge interstellar corporations that did business on Earth had any inclination to support upending the status quo in the abstract, a lot of them were adamantly opposed to the picking fights with Manticore. At least, they were opposed to picking fights that couldn't be won; closing the wormhole network to League shipping was costing many of the trans-stellars a great deal of money, and they wanted that stopped. It really didn't matter to them whether it was stopped due to pressure on the Mandrins or the SIP actually achieving its goal of a Sol outside the League or even by some Manty Admiral dictating terms from Earth orbit.

"Our analysis suggests things ought to be wrapped up within five years as far as the military side goes. And it's hard to see how any Sol-based political entity can be a player of consequence before then. Besides," The other woman said. "He's not going to pull it off." And she gave her agent (and to all outside appearances, her lover) a kiss goodbye.

It was easy enough to believe a former 'pleasure slave' had sworn off men. And when the Alignment had decided the SIP was worth infiltrating, if only just to observe at first, interesting but uninterested had been seen as the best cover for someone working with Kevin. The man was a gifted if overly idealistic politician, but he would have made a play for her if he thought he had any chance. And Zara had no intention of getting too tightly tangled with him; he was small change when all was said and done. The entire Sol system was small change.

[break]

_Solarian League Office of Operational Analysis HQ, Earth_

"Do you know anything about Indira Thenuwara?" Irene Teague asked her co-conspirator.

"Nothing that's not public knowledge, no. Her star is rising since the Battle of Sanderson, even if she 'let' the elves walk away with a Frontier Fleet detachment, but she's never been very popular with a lot of… more traditional… elements within Battle Fleet and that's truer now than ever." Daud al-Fanudahi replied.

"How far do you think they'd go against her?"

"I can't imagine anything beyond the usual bureaucratic infighting. Moving too forcefully against her would make enemies of the whole Thenuwara clan, and most of them are not quixotic characters like Battle Fleet's newest Fleet Admiral. Why do you ask?"

"Because I got wind of an internal affairs investigation into her ties with the Solarian Independence Party. It's in the very preliminary stages, but it feels like there are some very major movers and shakers involved."

"The SIP may have been fairly fringe until recently, but it's a legitimate political party here in the Sol system. The only thing she could do that would merit more than a mild official reprimand would be promising military support for a coup, and I can't imagine she would do that."

"On the other hand, suggesting she might could well take down not just Fleet Admiral Thenuwara, but all of her senior subordinates as well."

"It would take more than jealousy to convince even the more stubborn of our colleagues to cashier the only officers who have won a fleet engagement in the last fifty years."

"Then unless we want to posit yet another conspiracy, we know who is really behind this. Proving it, on the other hand, could be more difficult."

[break]

_Michael S. Garrett Royal Prison, near Caemlyn, Princedom of Sanderson_

"Thank you for agreeing to let us interview him." Lt. Yuan Xing of the Rivendell Navy's Intelligence Corps said to the prison guard on duty. It was important to keep up pretenses. In this case, officially a request to interview the Princedom's former intelligence chief had been made by the Republic of Rivendell to the new government of the Princedom of Sanderson. Unofficially, the request came from somewhere in the Grand Alliance's collective intelligence apparatus, and had been made to Fleet Admiral Thenuwara, who held the Princedom's high orbitals and had forced the change in government. And officially Lt. Xing was the lead, with Lt. (jg) Andrew Mendoza of RMN Intelligence merely her assistant. In fact, the Sphinxian treecat accompanying Mendoza was the real lead investigator.

The former intelligence chief had insisted on his attorney's presence, and his interrogators had agreed that he did legally have the right to consul, under Sanderson, League, Manticoran, and Rivendellian law.

"If you had any serious charges to bring, I'm sure this spineless new government of Admiral Thenuwara's would have made them already." He said. "So what do you want?"

"We're not here to make any new charges against you. There are simply some questions that recently came to our governments' attention that you should know the answer to." Lt. Xing said.

"I have already told the new government's people everything they asked that would not be a violation of my oaths to the Princess."

_ «He believes that to be true.» _ Sharp Mind signed.

"At the time of the Princedom's attack on the Rivendell Terminus system, its location was not public. And there are a fair number of uninhabited systems within the boundaries of the Republic." Xing continued.

"Yes, the old Rivendell Republic claimed a great many of them for 'security reasons' and the League did recognize that claim when they brought the old Republic into the League. The Princedom never recognized those claims."

She didn't need the treecat's signing to know that was pure bluster. If the League recognized a claim on a system, it was accepted. If they cared enough, Manticore could challenge that. The Princedom of Sanderson could not.

"What concerns our governments, though, is how your government learned which of those systems held the wormhole bridge terminus. Our interviews with your former government and military personnel claimed the information was provided by your agency."

"We did some fairly extensive data analysis to narrow the possibilities."

_ «True, but he's hiding something.» _ The 'cat added.

"That would not have given you the location soon enough, without a great deal of luck." She said.

"We received an anonymous tip. And made rather extensive efforts to track down where that tip came from, without much success. The records of that investigation should not have been purged."

_ «He believes this.» _Sharp Mind confirmed.

"Thank you. That was most helpful." She said.

After they were ought of hearing range of the former intelligence chief, though, Mendoza spoke up.

"Of course, trying to track down the probable Alignment operative who tipped him off a year ago isn't likely to be helpful, even with my furry friend."

_ «But I'm certainly going to try.» _ He signed.

[break]

_Heinlein Station, Centaurian Union of Free Habitats_

Kevin had always had a flair for the dramatic, and gathering on mankind's oldest habitation outside the Sol System was certainly that. The slowboat that eventually became the core of Heinlein Station was not the first colony ship to leave humanity's home system. It was, however, the first to reach its destination. Its settlers had been mostly from Sol's asteroid belt, and their goal had simply to get beyond the reach of Sol's government. They knew how to live in space, and did not want to take the time trying to find and terraform a planet. So they had stocked an interstellar ship, and planned to make it their home permanently.

Over the centuries, Heinlein Station had grown, and scores of stations filled out the Alpha Centauri system now. Its population was quite low for a full league member; with no habitable planets, growth had to be carefully managed. But there were still hundreds of millions of people there these days. And fifteen of those, including Kevin, were leaders of independence movements from deep core worlds.

"Even for your people, it looked like there was a lot of construction going on when I came in." Kevin told his Centaurian counterpart.

"Long-haul trade networks are in shambles. People all over the league are trying to expand local industrial production. And when they need new space stations quickly, they talk to us." Fab modules and pre-fab space habitat components had been one of the Centaurian Union's biggest exports since multi-megaton cargo ships had become practical. They needed them to keep up with their own growth; building some capacity for export was natural. And since they were building the same designs they used for their own people (barring modifications for local conditions), what the Centaurians built was of very high quality, especially for the price

"That might explain some of it, but even a politician like your truly can recognize a military shipyard when he sees one."

"I can't tell you more than public record on that. I may be the leader of a minor party here in the Union, but I'm still an elected representative and some parts of our defense budget are classified. We are expanding and modernizing our SDF, but the details of with what… well, if your plans and mine and ours succeed, you'll be able to ask through official channels and get an answer. But right now, I can't tell you, Kevin."

"I understand. No one's backing out at the last second, right?"

"I don't think so. A few of our little circle who have been closer to the political mainstream of their respective home worlds for a longer time are a bit nervous, but everyone realizes how badly closing the wormhole network is hurting us, and that we can't fix the kind of problems that dragged us into a war with Manticore without making fundamental change."

"Good." Kevin said.

A few hours later, he and the other fourteen signed their names to a document that began in a direct quote.

_When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…_


	4. October, 1924 PD

October, 1924 PD

_Sanderson System, aboard Admiral Thenuwara's flagship_

Fleet Admiral Thenuwara had seen the news reports of the SIP's declaration three days ago. Theirs and fourteen other independence-minded parties in the deep core of the Solarian League. On one level, it was exactly what she wanted. The worlds represented by the signatories to Diaz' declaration were the homes of over ninety percent of the crew in her fleet. And a new government created under the principles of that declaration would be one she and her people would be proud to serve. But things were moving too fast. She wished she could move her fleet back to the Sol system and cut two weeks of message delays. She supposed she shouldn't complain; without access to the wormhole network, her news from Sol would be six weeks old instead of two, but she was worried things could fall apart on Sol and she would not be able to do anything. Trusting her father, who had only let her know he'd supported her efforts all along months ago, seemed a thin reed to hold on to.

She did not trust anyone else in the SLN with protecting the very secret R&amp;D and construction happening at Sanderson. And while other Battle Fleet Admirals could eventually learn pod-based tactics given three and a half squadrons of SD(P)s to play with, it would take them quite a bit longer. They'd need to make all the mistakes the Manties and Havenites had made themselves, instead of learning from their experience. But if she could have her fleet in two places at once, she would have done it.

"And Raina's letter has me even more concerned." She told Admiral Richt, who was dining with her. Commander Raina Thenuwara was her grand-niece, and assigned to Battle Fleet's side of Operational Analysis. "A captain in her section apparently asked her if she could get a letter to me without alerting anyone higher up. She would have expected a trap, except that the captain has been embarrassingly paranoid about Haven sector military for years before we started shooting at them."

"I heard something similar from Stephanie." He said. That would be his cousin's daughter and a Frontier Fleet intelligence junior captain. "This sounds… very serious. With that kind of charges, against all of your senior staff, they could easily send a fleet out here to shoot first and ask questions later."

"If I had to order my people to fire on the SLN, I was really hoping to be out of it first."

"I didn't think we'd be in this kind of situation when I signed up for your crazy scheme either, Indira." Admiral Richt said. "Lately I've been thinking we sacrificed some things to it that we didn't need to."

"When we were twenty, we were just kids – kids with second-gen prolong who ought to live a long time since no one was fool enough to fight the SLN. When we were fifty and just seeing the edges of the problems that became 'my little scheme' I started getting worried about us being seen to be close. And we'd exchanged no vows, and even had other relationships from time to time. Agreeing to keep 'us' under the radar seemed like a good idea, and we'd gone years without seeing each other before. It took me a while to realize that by the time anyone got around to looking, things would be much too far gone for the lack of any formal relationship between us to stop anyone moving against me or you from following on."

"Unfortunately, we've realized this while you actually are my commanding officer. Still, if we survive long enough that we're not in the SLN and I'm not under your direct command, sixty-odd years is a long enough courtship, don't you think?"

"Yes, Jared, I do."

He didn't leave her cabin until the next morning.

[break]

_Osgiliath orbit,_ _Rivendell System, near the General Dynamics of Rivendell shipyard complex_

"Release from the cradle." A tech said, and the drone was drifting in space. "It's your show now, Dr. Fey."

"Engage the spider drive, minimum acceleration." Or rather, their best guess at one right now. Two months ago, she'd shown Admiral Michaels a model. Today, they'd find out if the real universe's physics agreed with their simulation of it. But the drone crept forward.

"No gravitic signature on the standard recon drone." Another tech reported. "Visual and thermal are tracking." They had not, for this first trial run, built any stealth features into the spider drive drone.

"And the … special… one?" Dr. Fey asked.

"Nothing, nothing, and there's a blip." A third technician said. "The effective range is a lot shorter than standard graviitcs, and we're not trying to apply any other stealth tech to the spider drone yet, but we've definitely got something here. Unless the Mesan's drive is similar in abstract principles, but completely different in implementation."

"Step up the acceleration and try again." They cycled through the battery of tests ten times in all, going from .1g to the 20g that was the maximum the test drone had been designed for.

A few hours later, she looked up from the results of her test.

"What we have may not be _exactly_ how the Mesans did it, but it certainly produces the same signature the Manties and Graysons are sure belonged to their 'mystery attackers'. And it least in the bounds of our test, our detector works. Excellent work, all of you."

[break]

_Caemlyn, Princedom of Sanderson_

"How long are we going to keep this up before we admit we're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the haystack is just too big?" Lt. Xing asked. They'd found some leads that Sanderson's intelligence services had not, but so far the anonymous tipster – and almost certain Mesan operative – had eluded them.

"As long as it takes. Do you want to give up and report failure to Victor Cachat?" Lt. Mendoza replied.

"Cachat is not in my chain of command. He's not in yours, either. And he's definitely not in Sharp Mind's."

"But you know where this mission came from." 'Special assignments' from 'Grand Alliance Intelligence'? Well, it was possible a certain noted Havenite agent wasn't behind them. Likely? Not so much.

_«And unlike you two-legs, I think we're making progress. »_ Sharp Mind signed. The Princedom's former intelligence service's attempts to trace the tip had run to ground at the store where the disposable comm the call had been placed from came from. The person who bought it had seemed very sincere when he claimed it had been stolen shortly after he purchased it. He'd even reported the theft to the police, and claimed he didn't get a good look at the thief. Sharp Mind, though, could tell he was hiding something. A bit of well-directed interrogation (Sharp Mind didn't even need to show his claws) had revealed that the man who'd purchased the comm had been paid several times the cost by a stranger, who had then never showed up to claim his merchandise. But following security camera footage, someone who could have been the thief also 'bumped' a man who had spoken to the comm purchaser before he entered the store.

The actual thief hadn't been hard to locate; a fairly skilled pickpocket who had been suspected a few times but never with enough evidence for a conviction. Unfortunately, they'd found a corpse rather than someone they could ask more questions of. The person who had been the ultimate recipient of the comm had proved harder to trace.

"In a lot of ways I wish we could show he'd gone off-planet, as long as he didn't sneak on to a private yacht." Xing said.

_«They never say so, but these people do not seem to like us much. »_ Sharp Mind signed.

"Technically the Sollies forced a new government on them, not us, but they couldn't have done it over our objections. And while Harriet II Sanderson might not have been popular on some of the worlds she or her father conquered, here on Sanderson was another story. Forcing them to sell a Solarian contractor a shipyard set up to build ships of the wall a good two generations more advanced than SLN standard issue had to rub a lot of them the wrong way, too. It's not hard to see why elves and Manticorans and Sollies are not so popular in Caemlyn." Mendoza said.

"And that passing through a public, well-monitored spaceport – which describes every spaceport on this planet – would give us a much smaller set of targets than an entire planet, too." Xing finished.

"We've got programs in place to catch him if he shows up on any public security camera, assuming he hasn't changed his appearance enough to fool them. Since Ruth and Anton gave them a once-over after NavInt's boys did the development, there's at least a chance things that our Alignment agent would expect to work will not." Mendoza said.

_«We're making progress. »_ Sharp Mind signed. _«But I hate waiting. »_

[break]

_New Capetown system, aboard Admiral Wesley Marrone's flagship_

The operation to seize the New Capetown-New Beijing Bridge had been a bit of test for Wes Marrone's task force. They had been training for nearly a year with mixed task forces from all the Grand Alliance partners who could spare ships for it. Even in the defense of the Manticoran home system, the Havenite forces had only coordinated with the RMN at the highest level. What Marrone was trying to do was make a division of Rivendell dreadnoughts, a division of Havenite SDs, a division of Manticoran SDs, an 'Erewhonese' light cruiser squadron and a Grayson carrier group act as one squadron. The process had more than a few bumps – some of which had been smoothed out as hardware closer to Manticore/Grayson levels had become available to other alliance partners, and others just by experience – but Marrone thought he could even match an all-Manticoran task force ton for ton at this point. His hardware might not be quite as good, but the Alliance had sent him very good people; Starks might have been a touch overconfident the first time he'd exercised against Marrone back in the Manticore binary system, but Marrone had absolutely no worries about him commanding the squadron on the other side of the bridge. And he was similarly impressed by the other senior officers of his task force.

It was true that he'd hit both ends of the bridge with heavier forces than Manticore had used for most of the Case Lacoön raids, which had discouraged futile attempts to hold them. But he'd had reason for that. This particular bridge had a much higher chance than most of an attempt to retake it. The SLN almost certainly had no illusions it could force its way through the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and on to the Spindle-Rivendell bridge, but shaving three weeks off of the trip from Sanderson – where the most advanced ships and missiles the SLN was building were being constructed – might well seem important to Solarian officials less clear-headed than Indira Thenuwara. So presenting actual ships of the wall at both ends of the bridge seemed like a good idea for now.

"Admiral, the picket's reporting four Solarian light cruisers hypered in and fired off recon drones, but stayed beyond the hyper limit and immediately started cycling up their hyper generators again. Given that our mission was to have a noticeable presence, we didn't shoot them down." And even with FTL comm, it was too late to overrule the picket captains, but he had no desire to. If the SLN had something they thought could take a Grand Alliance squadron of wallers and screen heading this way, he wanted to know it.

"Let it go by, just like we planned things." He said.

[break]

_Mandela system, aboard the SLNS Currie_

Fleet Admiral Koh was disappointed, but not surprised when his scouts reported two each of Rivendell DNs, Havenite SDs, Manticoran SDs, and unknown waller-sized ships at New Capetown. Along with a squadron each of BCs and light cruisers. At least the BCs weren't those 2 Megaton Manticoran monstrosities that had been reported from Talbot. He supposed declining to face six to eight of the wall with over one hundred would normally be seen as cowardice. But he had a mission to accomplish.

"Send a dispatch boat to HQ and tell them we're taking the long way to Canton and awaiting further orders there."

He knew what orders to expect, and did not see any choice but to plan on obeying them. It was far, far too late for him to back out now.


	5. November, 1924 PD

**November, 1924 PD**

_New Beijing System, aboard HMS Lynx_

"… This notice constitutes your promotion to Vice-Admiral. Neither I nor anyone in the Grand Alliance command can think of anyone better suited than you to serve as second in command of the Rivendell task force."

In some ways that had surprised Ted Starks. He'd left the Navy once after putting his twenty T-years in before the first Havenite war, and again rather than serve in Janacek's navy. The officers he had graduated from Saganami Island with were at least as senior, if they'd stayed in the Navy and survived, but he'd retired once as a commander, and once as a newly-promoted commodore whose squadron would have seen its first action in latter stages of Buttercup.

And his original orders when he'd been slated to take command of a squadron of brand-new Invictus-class SD(P)s would have sent him to 10th Fleet. All six were named after member systems of the Star Empire on that side of the Lynx terminus, after all. Those orders had changed. First to keep him in the home system through the Solarian and Mesan attacks, and then to head out to Rivendell in support of the Star Empire's new allies. Still, another RMN SD(P) squadron was coming out to Rivendell, along with a carrier and some screening elements, and Starks guessed that Caparelli didn't want the senior RMN officer to be only a Rear Admiral.

He hadn't thought the powers that be would fast-track someone who had clearly shown he'd prefer to be a civilian. Which was true; if he was fairly certain the Star Kingdom – no, the Star Empire – was at peace and it would last, he'd return to merchant service fairly quickly. Sadly, he saw no sign of that any time soon, and he supposed his track record did say that he might be fairly competent at war.

His musings were interrupted by a page from his comm officer. "_Benton_ is back, and Commander Paris is asking to confer with you over FTL rather than wait to get in."

"Patch her through to my stateroom, then." One of the bigger challenges in operating the Rivendell task force as a unified fleet, rather than a collection of squadrons under the same high command, was the different traditions involved. A Grayson would certainly have waited to speak to him in person, and another Manticoran probably would have. Starks certainly couldn't do anything significant based on what she said before the Beowulf-flagged light cruiser _Benton_ caught up to the rest of them. But the Solarian tradition – and the Maya Sector, Beowulf and especially Rivendellian forces in the fleet had definitely grown out of the Solarian tradition, even if all had a great deal of contempt for much of the SLN – held that given the extremely capable electronic communication equipment any modern warship carried, there wasn't all that much value on face to face meetings. Striking a balance had been tricky.

"Admiral Marrone was right, sir. The fleet that left Mandela last month seems to be at Canton for now. I'm surprised a force that big didn't move against us at New Capetown, or at least here. We know how bad of an idea that is, but I haven't seen anyone in the SLN outside of Admiral Thenuwara's fleet that has even close to an accurate understanding of our capabilities." And when Thenuwara had seen the task force in action, Starks' RMN squadron had been the only part of it with Apollo.

"Even the slowest child learns not to stick his hand in the fire after he's burned enough times. Alternatively, we may have run into a brighter than average SLN fleet commander. Thank you for the report." He said and then formally concluded the conversation.

"I'm going to need to put together some messages for the next dispatch boat back to Rivendell and on to home, and another one through the wormhole to Admiral Marrone. We haven't been moving against Battle Fleet concentrations except when they actually attacked Alliance worlds. And while I'm not sure what that many SLN wallers could be doing out here, I can't think it's anything good."

[break]

_Solarian League Office of Operational Analysis HQ, Earth_

Irene Teague thought their conspiracy was risky enough, without drawing anyone else into it. Unfortunately, they'd already needed to draw Raina Thenuwara into the edges to get a warning to her aunt. And then one of their Marine 'friends' had suggested a perfect way to smoke out the Alignment operative tied to the SIP. If the Mesans were planning what she and Daud thought they were, there was very little chance they wouldn't take the bait. She just hoped Commander Thenuwara was up to it. It had been weeks since they kicked off the operation, and it seemed like it should work, but

Teague's comm chimed. "I've got the package, but you'll have to pick it up." Raina's voice said.

A few minutes later, Teague – and a squad of Marine Intelligence personnel, including a doctor, were at Commander Thenuwara's apartment. And Zara Meyer, chief of staff to the most vocal figure in the Solarian Independence Party, was lying unconscious on her couch. "This had better be for real. Even what you had me doing was legally questionable; what you asked me to hint my aunt was capable of doing is arguably treason; and what your people are doing now would be criminal if she were not a suspected foreign agent."

Raina seemed surprised by how carefully they examined the unconscious woman.

"They're checking for suicide devices, of any sort they can think of. She definitely had a poison tooth. It seems unlikely a Mesan agent would go for anything noisy that would take nearby people out along with themselves, but you can't be too sure."

"No one warned me about that. You just said to invite anyone who approached you at the rallies back to your place, and if anyone did more than once, give them a spiked drink."

"What was in that drink, Raina?" Zara groggily said. But she saw a lot more uniforms around than just that not-as-idealistic-as-she'd-seemed commander. There could be only one reason for that.

"I'm afraid we pulled your suicide tooth." The doctor said. "I don't suppose you would care to explain how a former Manpower slave came to be fitted with one?"

[break]

_Sanderson System, aboard Admiral Thenuwara's flagship_

"It looks like we've got enough mod 9s to retire the Cataphract-Cs." Commodore Yu Wen reported. The Sanderson Mod 7 missile was, on balance, probably a better capital missile than the Cataphract-C, but it was very much an example of improvised engineering. One in twenty of the missiles failed outright when they lit up their second stage. The Sandersons had a follow-on design in the pipeline that likely would have reduced the failure rate to one in a hundred. GIT's engineers, on the other hand, had applied first-line Solarian analysis equipment to the basic model the Sandersons had for reducing interference between stages of an MDM. They'd managed to eliminate the need for the 'pop-out' separation between stages entirely. And using the same capacitor technology GIT had provided to the Republic of Haven (the SLN had not been interested in paying for it) had improved the energy budget tremendously. Maintaining the same size for the missile body meant they were still very large missiles, but it also meant heavier warheads, higher acceleration, better EW capabilities, and more time before burn-out. It would be another two years before the twenty-four new _Admiral_-class SD(P)s under construction were ready, but the mod 9s would improve her capabilities a fair bit right now.

"Excellent. Unfortunately, my sources are pretty sure Koh is command of the fleet at Canton. Which means that whatever it's supposed to be doing out here, we're not going to like it. If it was to attack Manticore's allies, bypassing the forces they have on either side of the New Capetown – New Beijing Bridge would seem insane to the overwhelming majority of analysts in the fleet." She thought Kingsford understood intellectually that using Battle Fleet against modern ships of the wall was suicide (at least, unless you both had modern missile pods and were very, very careful), but he'd have trouble accepting emotionally that avoiding six of the wall with over a hundred of your own was in fact the smart move. In fact, she was fairly certain Kingsford wouldn't have ordered someone like Koh out to this part of the galaxy, which raised the question of how he'd gotten here. Though the man was a solid, if uninspired, fleet commander in her estimation, despite the many things about him she found disagreeable.

"You know the fleet will support you if you don't intend to go quietly."

"If I have no intention of setting myself up as a warlord – and I do not, here in Sanderson or anywhere else – then I need to have somewhere to call home if we can't go back to earth. If we're lucky, things will break there before they do here."

[break]

Replacing someone as talented as Zara Meyer weeks before a critical election was not something Kevin Diaz had appreciated. The grim-faced SLN Marine Intelligence officers who had explained to him that his chief of staff would be indefinitely detained had not made things any better. He had little liking for most League officials. But the emails exchanged in his name with Indira Thenuwara and an exchange with Audrey O'Harnahan where Zara seemed to be hinting that she would reveal a plot between Thenuwara and Diaz' party. And if that had happened, he would never be in the position he was now.

The final results had been tallied yesterday, and the SIP had won thirty-six percent of the vote for the Sol System Parliament's upper house, and five hundred sixteen of the two thousand and one members in the lower house. That made them the single largest party in the upper house, where voters chose on pure party preference. In the lower house, individual candidates faced each other, a new party who gained a majority of its votes from Sol system residents who did not live on Earth was at a disadvantage. In the Belt and on Luna, some of its candidates had been elected with absolute majorities. On Old Earth, only a handful of SIP candidates had squeaked by with a plurality; the old major parties were more firmly entrenched in most districts. The handful of exceptions were largely captive to single individuals or boutique parties; they were often able to swing control of Parliament, but could not this time.

"Relax, Johan." Diaz told the Alliance for Freedom's leader. "I told Quan earlier, and I'm telling you now, that I don't have any intention of setting up a bidding war for our party's services. I doubt any of us will have an outright majority – or even a plurality large enough to govern with just some of the small parties and independents as partners – any time soon." Certainly neither the Alliance nor One Sol had achieved an outright majority in decades; the SIP's emergence had taken some votes from the two established major parties, but mostly it had made its gains by reducing all other minor parties combined to a mere three percent of the vote for the upper house – below the threshold for representation even if all of those votes had been for the same party, and a fair number of its representatives in the lower house had been elected in other parties prior to yesterday's election.

"Thank you. If that's the case, I'll put all my cards on the table now. We'll agree to hold your referendum, you as Prime Minister, and your choice for Foreign Minister. Our choice for Treasury, and we control a majority of cabinet posts. And you know it will be easier to work with me than with Quan." He said. The Alliance was cozier with many of the trans-stellars than Diaz would have liked, but considering where much of the funding that had had bought his ascension had come from, he had little room to complain. And he was fairly certain that enough people who had supported other parties for one reason or another in the last election would still vote to leave the League. At least, they would right now, with ever-worse news coming in every day from the conflict with Manticore and their allies.

"That's probably true." There wasn't much to choose from between the old major parties, but the Alliance was probably, on balance, more amenable to compromise with his platform. "I don't want to drag out the secession referendum more than six weeks. Everyone has heard all the arguments on both sides already."

_Four Kings, Princedom of Sanderson_

Lt. Xing was not sure why their quarry had not left the planet. Passing through a spaceport might have increased his risk of detection, but if he could get beyond the hyper limit before the authorities discovered him he'd be free and clear. Perhaps he knew how wide-spread and effective the algorithms looking for him were. He'd certainly managed to avoid them until a few hours ago. She supposed everyone made a mistake eventually, but she was uneasy. Lt. Mendoza and Sharp Mind were showing it too. But even the 'cat had nothing definite to point his suspicion at.

"The camera that caught him is right…"

And she heard the crack of a pulser dart, and had barely noticed that the treecat had been the first target. A second dart struck Andrew Mendoza while Yuan was drawing her own. Neither she nor Mendoza were wearing armor. No one had gotten around to even designing armor for a treecat. She tried to find cover as she drew her own sidearm, but a third dart struck her much too quickly.

The shooter would have no choice but leave Sanderson now, but two Grand Alliance intelligence investigators and a Sphinxian treecat were far too dangerous to have on Sanderson. His superiors had other agents in-system. His opponents would have to go back Manticore to find another 'cat and investigator trained to work with one.


	6. December, 1924 PD

**December, 1924 PD**

_Darius System_

"I don't see much choice, either." Albrecht Detweiller said. "If our agent in Rivendell is wrong about what the elves have come up with, then we can hold off. But if he's correct…"

"If he's correct, we don't have much choice. Strike now, or our secret weapon becomes a lot less potent. But the Manties and their allies know we exist and know we have the spider already. And we have to hit their R&amp;D _somewhere_. If we can't find Bolthole, Beowulf is too risky, and the complexes in the Manticore home system aren't fully up to speed, then Rivendell is the best place we can do that." Colin said. "We won't have time for the degree of scouting we did for Oyster Bay, but there's only one target that truly matters for this op. General Dynamics' shipyards would be nice bonus, but hardly critical."

"But it does make things riskier. Instead of losing a Ghost or two, we could lose a whole squadron of _Leonard Detweillers_." Albrecht said.

"Whatever they've got, it was developed in less than three years, working against mathematical models and just maybe a crude spider drive test platform. I don't think the risk is that high."

"I hope you're right."

_Canton System, aboard the SLNS Currie_

Fleet Admiral Koh was trying to appear unconcerned. But he had expected orders to move on to Sanderson to appear by now. He'd hardly been informed of many details, but he needed to know some things. And with what he had known, news reports of pro-secessionist parties becoming part of the governing coalition on eight deep core worlds – one of them Earth itself – seemed unlikely to be part of the plan. Which meant the justification he'd been primed to use to move on Thenuwara was worthless.

Either his handlers would try and construct another, or they would instruct him to move on without one. They'd only told him any details of the operation he was involved in, but he was – when he admitted it to himself – a rather better strategist than tactician. They clearly wanted to destroy the League, but they also wanted to prevent competing new centers of power from emerging. That was almost certainly one of the primary goals of re-igniting the Manticore/Haven war, and of creating a war between Manticore and the League. But an independent Sol system with extremely capable senior naval personnel – even if their equipment was 'mere' SLN cast-offs – would be an even bigger threat than Manticore.

And if the fifteen-system 'Solarian Union' proposed by the secessionist parties of the deep core systems most closely allied with Sol came into being, it would instantly become no worse than the third-richest polity in human space. When the remnants of the League collapsed enough, it would be no worse than second. He wasn't an economist to figure exactly where the 'Solarian Union' would stand vis a vis the 'Star Empire' of Manticore, but it scarcely mattered. If that star nation was created, and allowed to survive its birth pains, it would become a first-tier power, and probably do so faster than almost anyone would expect. Especially if it had Indira Thenuwara commanding its Navy in the field, and the 'General Industries of Terra' shipyard at Sanderson building ships and providing new designs for it.

Destroying 34th Fleet here and now would go a long way in the direction of preventing that.

_Rivendell System, at Rivendell Navy Fleet HQ_

"Well, General Dynamics seems to be having a very good day." Commodore Madison Keeley said aloud as she was making her way through her email.

"The Grand Alliance finally signed off on the _Dragon_-class proposal?" Admiral Caitlin Michaels half-asked her chief of staff. "Good."

The _Dragon_-class was a response to a thorough review of what classes the alliance had available, how they dealt with the current threat environment, and how they would deal with the environment that would exist when certain tech monopolies were broken. General Dynamics had argued that although the _Saganami_-C class had more offensive firepower than a first Havenite war era battle cruiser, its limited crew size and relatively limited defensive firepower and combat endurance meant that it would be filling the role of light cruiser when the Grand Alliance's enemies were able to field missiles similar to the Mark 16. And at nearly two and a half megatons, the _Nike_-class was far too large and expensive to take over traditional heavy cruiser roles. Nor was any existing class in the Grand Alliance's inventory up to the task.

Hence the _Dragon_. Its basic hull form was derived from the Rivendell Navy's relatively new _Warder_-class BC, but that was where similarities stopped. The missile armament had been upgraded from the single-drive (though extended-range and fusion-powered) Heronmark to the Manticoran Mark 16-G. Bays for two Dreamwalker platforms had been built in, providing much of the capacity of Keyhole in a platform that would fit in a hull in the tonnage range of a traditional battle cruiser. The hyper generator rooms had been enlarged to make upgrading to streak drive capability possible, as the teams at Bolthole were even farther along there than Dr. Fey's group was in reverse engineering the spider. Since they had Dr. Simoёs, and so were not working entirely from scratch, that was to be expected. The construction materials and electronics had been upgraded to the best available Alliance technology – though General Dynamics was quite proud that had meant sticking with their own inventions rather more often than the other alliance partners would have believed before they had started working closely with the Rivendellians.

The end result was a one megaton 'heavy cruiser' that could engage most pre-pod ships of the wall with a good chance of success, carried five fifty hundred crew, and could be built and maintained for less than two-thirds the cost of a _Nike_. True, it was nowhere near as tough as a Nike, but it could also be built in a traditional BC building slip, whereas a Nike required one over twice as large and a subset of the special materials that were only used elsewhere in construction of ships of the wall. Manticore had either built slips from scratch or reused them from slips used to build nearly-as-large _Agamemnon_-class ships for its _Nikes_, but their allies with surviving shipyards had quite a lot of traditional BC-sized slips. And General Dynamics had pointed out that it would only take three more months to build an entirely new _Nike_-sized slip and a _Nike_ than to expand an existing BC slip and do the same… and if the Alliance built new slips, the existing ones could crank out two _Dragons_ in the same time and it would have three ships instead of one.

The Rivendell Navy had already built a squadron for its own use, but convincing the rest of the Alliance they were worthwhile had been a major coup for General Dynamics, and one that had gone a long way to assuaging some bruised egos at Rivendell's primary warship manufacturer. Throwing the vast majority of its resources into building someone else's designs was not something any arms contractor ever wanted. But mostly-standardizing the next-generation platforms ought to help the alliance in the long run.

"And the _Asha'man_ are officially ready for working up before Admiral Carroll gets a hold of them. The _Allomoncers_ are still slated to be split between Marrone's command and allied fleets, but it's looking like six more months before the first flight of those are ready." Keeley continued.

When the design for the _Aes Sedai_ class DN(P) had been finalized, the _Asha'man_ class SD(P) had been envisioned as its larger counterpart, and the intention had been to build 30 of them to replace the final 18 _Assassin_-class DNs if the Rivendell Republic broke from the League while the class was still a viable design. And Michaels had ordered the first six of the class laid down before the alliance with Manticore was finalized. But while the Alliance's engineers had figured out how to fit some Apollo capability into the _Asha'man_ class (and the last two flights of _Aes Sedai_), the Dreamwalker II platforms allowed those classes to control just enough Apollo missiles for a quad pattern over their FTL links. The Keyhole II platforms carried by the latest Manticoran (and Grayson and Andermani) ships of the wall, on the other hand, allowed a single SD(P) to manage an entire squadron's fire control if necessary and enabled significant defensive upgrades as well.

Hence the decision to build the very lightly modified version Grayson's _Harrington II_ class that Rivendell's office of ship building dubbed the _Allomancer_ class in Rivendell service. And the destruction of the Manticoran and Grayson's shipyards meant General Dynamics was building ships of the wall for Rivendell's new allies as well as its own navy. The ships intended for the Rivendell Navy maintained only one very minor difference with those intended for allies. There had been some debate about dropping the Rivendell Navy's characteristic high-resolution smart paint and starship-scale murals now that there was no need to deceive the SLN. But since the additional cost was a tiny percentage of the cost of even a destroyer, the decision had been made to stick with them. Even if Rivendell's allies thought they were something of an eccentricity, the Rivendell Navy's powers that be liked them.

"Not bad at all. It looks like they actually completed the Asha'man in less time than they took for any flight of Aes Sedai. If they keep improving at this rate, they'll be matching what Manticore could do at _Hephaestus_ at their best soon." Michaels said.

"Still, it's not too surprising. The first flight of Aes Sedai were a radical new design based on a concept we only knew about from observation of the Havenite Wars. The second flight was laid down only nine months later. And the third and fourth were radically redesigned while we were building them to incorporate technology from our new allies. Whereas we'd barely gotten started on the _Asha'man_ when the alliance with Manticore was formalized, and they didn't incorporate any technology that we hadn't already built into at least the last flights of _Aes Sedai_ first."

"At least no one on the Council is paying attention to the protesters claiming that since what we have is already more than good enough to stand off any hostile navy, continuing to expand our wall of battle is a waste of time and money."

"Even if some civilians are not, the Council is well aware of what happened to Manticore when they decided to rest on their laurels with less than 20% of their wall of battle incorporating their latest technology. And if we need to worry about the Mesan Alignment, not just warlords – and we would have even if we hadn't allied with Manticore – then even the 72 ship wall we were targeting before we discovered the bridge to Spindle isn't going to be enough. We could have manned that just out of modernizing our pre-pod wall. To get what we're planning now – it's a good thing we 'acquired' the Frontier Fleet training center that we encouraged the SLN to build here, because we're certainly sending a lot of people through it."

_Pournelle Station, Centaurian Union of Free Habitats_

"Even some of our people are still calling these things toys." Commodore Eric MacNamara of the Centaurian Union Navy (only weeks removed from being the Centaurian Union Self-Defense Force). "And we've never had more than a handful of hyper-capable warships."

As the Union's highest-ranking officer, he'd had a great deal of input into the plans for modernizing and expanding the Union's armed forces. On paper, the plan they were following was tactically sound, logistically rational, and should make scaling up straightforward. But the notion of relying on LACs and missile pods controlled from forts without Battle Fleet or any other ships of the wall to call on in an emergency was a bit frightening.

"They'll come around." Captain Sharon Graf said. She headed the Union Navy's Office of Shipbuilding, such as it was. Two years ago, that had meant she was responsible for the construction of about a LAC every year, a light cruiser or tin can every five years, and fortress every ten. Now she had scores of LACs and a dozen forts under construction, and the only reason she didn't have more was the need to produce a trained cadre of officers to form the core of the next round of expansion. "The _Defiants_ are very capable little ships. Even the guys who are skeptical about what modern LACs have done in the Havenite Wars just need some time to get used to them. We might not have mastered every trick Manticore or Haven came up with, but they're a heck of a lot more capable than any old-style LAC."

"I suppose you're right. And if the 'Solarian Union' does end up going through – and I think it will – then we'll have at least some modern heavy metal. If things play out as everyone's hoping anyway." The latest polls he had seen had suggested the secession referendum on Sol would pass. Not by the overwhelming margins of Rivendell or Beowulf, or even the 13 point margin that had been achieved here in the Union, but by more than enough to be outside the margin of error, or even outside another week's shifts of public opinion.

"We've got some reports that Crosby Heavy Industries is building a quite respectable new cruiser for the Ontario Navy, too. So if between us we can put together a LAC carrier, we'll have most of a lineup of modern warships, if none in any great quantities."

* * *

_**Technical note:**_

Just in case anyone is getting a bit confused on the relative capabilities of the various classes of ships of the wall that I've introduced, here they are from most to least combat capable (with a few official classes for reference)

**Classes with FTL fire control**

Grand Alliance _Allomancer_/_Harrington-II-B_/_Invictus-B_ SD(P) – Has Keyhole II and Apollo, can be upgraded to streak drive, and has various minor upgrades from the Grayson Harrington II derived from Allied technological developments. All SDs laid down by all Grand Alliance partners after formally joining the Grand Alliance are of this class. None are in service as of December 1924 PD, though the first are less than six months from completion; over one hundred are under construction between the yards at Rivendell, Bolthole, Beowulf, Manticore, and Grayson (with the ones at Rivendell farthest along).

Manticoran Alliance _Invictus_/_Harrington II_ SD(P)– Missing some minor tech upgrades incorporated to some of the classes below, and _cannot_ be upgraded to streak drive, but the most powerful SD(P) design currently in service as of December 1924 PD.

Havenite _Teremaire-B_ SD(P) (post-Grand Alliance) – Built at Bolthole except for their Keyhole II modules (which were built on Beowulf), these ships were upgraded while under construction to include latest-generation Grand Alliance technology. All Havenite SD(P)s that were six months or more from completion when the Grand Alliance was formalized have been upgraded to this design.

Rivendell _Asha'man_ SD(P)– Although its use of the far smaller and less capable Dreamwalker II platforms (even with six platforms instead of two) for FTL fire control rather than Keyhole II limits the size of Apollo salvos a single Asha'man can handle, in all other respects it incorporates the latest available Grand Alliance technology. Originally intended to be a class of 30 ships, only the original six were built as the _Allomancer_ design superseded it.

Andermani _Adler_ SD(P) (post-Manticoran Alliance) – Although the Andermani SD(P) designed lost considerable pod capacity in the design changes to add Keyhole II, it is still an extremely capable class.

Rivendell _Aes Sedai_ DN(P) (flights III and IV) – The Grand Alliance developed the Dreamwalker II platform for the Aes Sedai and Asha'man class vesssels under construction when Rivendell joined the Grand Alliance. This added limited Apollo capability and various other upgrades (improved compensators, improved FTL comm, etc.) to the already formidable _Aes Sedai_. Arguably the _Aes Sedai_ class is, at 7 megatons, a dreadnought in name only; it is larger than the SLN _Scientist_ class SD.

**Classes without FTL fire control**

Manticoran Alliance _Medusa_/_Harrignton_ SD(P) – The original pod SD design, it is still more capable than any SD(P) built without the benefit of Manticoran Alliance technology.

Erewhon/Maya TBA SD(P) class – This class hasn't appeared in the 'Bridge' series, and has only been mentioned by implication in the canon Torch sub-series. However, as it has been described as an SD(P) built with the best of 'Manty Lite' + Solarian + Haven tech available to Erewhon and Maya, I'm tentatively placing it here.

General Industries of Terra _Admiral_ SD(P) – At this point it is unclear whether this class will be put into service by the SLN, the Sol System Navy, or the Solarian Union Navy (if the latter does come into existence). However, applying GIT's first-line Solarian technology to the Princedom of Sanderson's basic design, then applying some of the 'Fleet 2000' principles of designing for upgradability (especially in areas with known Manticoran advantages) make this a quite capable class even if GIT makes no further advances during its development. It is capable of being upgraded to Keyhole II/Apollo capability should GIT gain access to said technology. As designed, probably slightly less capable than an Aes Sedai on a ton per ton basis, but is 1.5 MT larger and that makes a difference. GIT currently has 32 under construction at Sanderson. GIT anticipates it will have a triple-drive MDM will be in production by the time the first units of this class are completed.

Rivendell _Aes Sedai_ DN(P) (flights I and II) – The Aes Sedai class combined first-line Solarian technology, Rivendell's independent developments, and everything their observers learned from the first Havenite War. Because it was not designed and built under the same intense time pressure as the _IAN Adler_ and _RHN Sovereign of Space_ classes and was built from a far stronger technological base, the original _Aes Sedai_ class, even before Alliance upgrades, and even with 'merely' dual-drive missiles, was more than a match for pre-Alliance Havenite and Andermani SD(P)s over a megaton larger, largely because its effective range was probably greater and its defense capabilities definitely were.

Havenite _Teremaire_ SD(P) – Even though the RHN's triple-drive MDMs had a longer powered range than the Rivendell Navy's dual-drive _Callandor_ missile, the _Teremaire_ class included some Erewhonese tech transfer, and it out-massed the Rivendell Navy DN(P) by over a megaton, by most measures the Aes Sedai was the more capable warship.

Havenite _Sovereign of Space_ SD(P) – On balance, the RHN's first SD(P) was probably more capable than the IAN's, if only because examining captured RMN hardware and SLN tech transfers allowed them to develop better missiles than the IAN did prior to allying with Manticore.

Andermani _Adler_ SD(P) (pre-Manticoran Alliance) – Despite the relative crudity of the IAN's first MDM design, in other areas the IAN's superior general level of technology to Haven came into play and made the _Adlers_ fairly formidable, although not as well-equipped to deal with the Janacek-era RMN as Gustav would have wished.

Princedom of Sanderson _Prince of Sanderson_ SD(P) – perhaps the 'crudest' SD(P) put into production by anyone, its missile pods were loaded with enormous dual-drive missiles that had about a 5% outright failure rate. Nonetheless, any pre-pod SD barring a first-line Manticoran Alliance ship with a great many pods on tow would find itself completely overmatched by a _Prince_. The Princedom built 40 of these, 28 survived the Battle of Sanderson to be captured and taken into service by Admiral Thenuwara and 34th Fleet.


	7. Early January, 1925 PD

January 1925 PD ended up split in two, because I'm trying to be somewhat more consistent in chapter lengths for this story than I was with "Bridge Building" (though this is still the longest chapter I've posted). If you've made it this far, you're probably anticipating both of the big events of January 1925 PD, and they bother needed more than 1500 words on their own. On the plus side, I should get part II of January 1925 PD out fairly soon after part I. Really. I mean it.

**Early January, 1925 PD**

_Sol System, Solarian League Navy HQ_

Fleet Admiral Winston Kingsford closed the last personal file on his workstation, and left his office for good. He'd spent most of his life climbing Battle Fleet's bureaucracy to get to the position he held… and after less than three years on the job, he'd submitted his resignation.

"You're sure we can't talk you out of it?" Rear Admiral Gweon asked.

"I don't think the commanding officer of the SLN should be a citizen of a world that formally seceded from the League." He said. It was more of an excuse than a real reason. He supposed an officer with more dedication to the navy in which he served would have stuck it out. The SLN had plenty of officers and enlisted from protectorates that were not formally part of the SLN. Almost none of them rose above the rank of Commander, and almost all of them served in Frontier Fleet or the Marines rather than Battle Fleet, but it provided plenty of precedent. But Kingsford was from Ontario, and his homeworld had not only seceded, their government was now led – like Sol's and six more systems – by signatories to the Solarian Union declaration of independence.

"Rumor has it that if the Solarian Union does get off the ground, they'll be tapping Aravind Thenuwara for your job." Gweon mentioned. Fleet Admiral Thenuwara's father may have been a civilian for twenty years, but he was certainly capable. In a great many ways, Gweon's capability had impressed Kingsford over his time commanding the SLN, but he had been insinuating the Thenuwara family was less than completely loyal to the League for well over a year now. Of course, they were almost all Sol System citizens, and as of two weeks ago, that meant they were not _League_ citizens anymore, and entering the service of their home world could hardly be considered disloyalty. And he had signed off on a proposal to sell the Sol System Navy some warships a few weeks ago… purely to help the SLN deal with its financial crisis, of course.

"He's welcome to it." Kingsford said. In fact, as near as Kingsford could tell, the still-nascent Solarian Union would be tapping the elder Thenuwara for the actual equivalent of his job if possible. The only person arguably more qualified to be the political head of the Solarian Union Navy was Kingsford himself, and there was no chance anyone that had been so closely involved with the SLN's recent fiascoes as he would be nominated to high office by a government as fundamentally opposed to the League's inherent cronyism as the Solarian Union's was likely to be. No, he was going to lie low for a few years, then take a job as lobbyist for a defense contractor. Which paid far better than even the top job in the SLN, and was considerably lower risk. Aravind could have the 'interesting' job of putting the Solarian Union Navy together. And he found that he did not care at all who was left holding the pieces of the SLN.

_Osgiliath orbit,_ _Rivendell System, General Dynamics of Rivendell shipyard complex_

The engineering teams attached to project Parker were working as quickly as they could to turn Dr. Fey's spider-detecting drone from a hand-built prototype to something that could be mass produced and interface directly with fire control. Knowing a spider drive ship was in the area was enormously helpful, if it could be learned soon enough to bring impeller wedges and sidewalls up and bring active defenses online. But if the Yawata Strike had been typical of how the Mesans would be using craft with the spider drive to attack, they had no intention of firing offensive weapons directly from those ships and giving their precise location away. Every missile that had attacked Manticore and Grayson's shipyards had been fired from pods; and the grasers had been fired from some sort of remote platform that almost certainly had a spider drive itself.

"That was well done." Dr. Fey said as her latest test concluded. Her latest spider test platforms, which had 'attacked' the station, had accelerated at 300 gravities. That was twice what the best grav plates available to the Alliance could compensate for and keep a human crew alive for any length of time. And those platforms had also incorporated the best stealth techniques available to hide the platforms from conventional sensors. To anything but the handful of hand-built 'spider sense' platforms deployed around the station, the test platforms were all but invisible. But the new platforms saw something different.

"I'd still like to improve the detection range, but I believe what we have is good enough to hand over to General Dynamics to use as a base for a series-produced drone. Any dissenting opinions?" She asked. Detecting the spider at all was a challenge. Detecting it soon enough that the Alliance could take advantage of the full range of its advantages in long-range missile combat seemed unlikely to be possible at all. Enough to be useful, especially if detected by drone with FTL communication capability, though, that seemed to have been achieved. No one seemed inclined to disagree.

While Dr. Fey's teams labored to protect the station (and any other Grand Alliance installation), other workers were adding still more building slips to the station proper. General Dynamics had wanted to avoid going to Grayson-style dispersed yards, even in the face of the need to expand as rapidly as possible. After what had happened to Manticore and Grayson's yards, they did not want any building slips that could not be covered with a bubble sidewall. If no method of detecting spider ships quickly enough were found, that precaution would be useless, but if one was, it could be enormously valuable.

In fact, the station's bubble sidewall generators and anti-missile defenses had been substantially upgraded over the last two years. The station was now capable of producing a sidewall even tougher than the forts Manticore had deployed to the Lynx terminus, and had as many counter-missile launchers and point defense laser clusters. And almost all of the conventionally-sized ships built for the Rivendell Navy were being constructed in the 'hard yard' slips attached to the station, which would be covered by that sidewall.

But in the end, General Dynamics had no choice but to build at least some dispersed slips. They might have been able to meet demands of the Rivendell Navy alone by expanding the station at a breakneck pace. Building all the other ships and missiles and Keyhole II modules and Mycroft platforms that they were building for Rivendell's allies was simply not possible without expanding faster than growing the station would allow.

No one in the Rivendell system had anticipated a need to build 2.5 megaton warships of any stripe until General Dynamics learned about the RMN's _Nike_ class, but the alliance wanted more of them nearly as badly as Apollo-capable ships of the wall. The _Dragons_ the Rivendell Navy was building for its own use were taking up old-style battle cruiser slips, but the other allied navies wanted some of them, too, and General Dynamics' yards had already begun production of them. In light of the way missile combat was trending, the Rivendell Navy had decided a _Saganami-C_ equivalent would be a light cruiser in their service, but it still took a bigger slip than the heavy cruisers it had built or operated previously. And Rivendell had not built many light or heavy cruisers previously; their planners had not anticipated how out of date the ships they 'appropriated' from the SLN would be.

_Rivendell System, aboard _RNS Rand al'Thor

Vice-Admiral Carroll had moved his flag when the first _Asha'man_ class SD(P) had completed its builders' trials two weeks ago. The _Asha'man_ class had the latest Alliance FTL comm on-board, whereas his twelve early-flight _Aes Sedai_ had 'merely' the best Rivendell had managed on its own (which is to say a fair bit better than anyone outside the Manticoran Alliance developed on their own), and so had the FTL bandwidth for even video transmission, whereas otherwise his on-board FTL would be limited to low bit-rate audio. And the _Aes Sedai_ merely had last-generation Rivendell compensators, not last-generation _allied_ compensators, which meant his SDs were faster than his DNs (and a lot of his smaller ships, too). He hadn't really wanted to move his flag despite the technological advantages, but they were too great to ignore.

"Flash priority message on the FTL from Osgiliath Station. They say the special detection net sees at least six incoming vessels that are at minimum ten megatons, and are relaying course and locus." Carroll had more than enough weight of metal to destroy sixty megatons of conventional ships of the wall. That had been true on the day he'd assumed command of Rivendell Home Fleet, and was even truer today.

Rivendell Home Fleet, at present, had a wall of battle of six brand-new (and Apollo-capable) _Asha'man_ class SD(P)s, the surviving twelve of Rivendell's first 18 _Aes Sedai_ class DN(P)s, and six of Rivendell's fifteen remaining _Assassin_ class DNs (one of the Rivendell Navy's standard 3-ship divisions having been mothballed to provide the crews for the six _Asha'man_ class SD(P)s). All four squadrons of wallers had their own powerful screens. And in addition, nearly five hundred Rivendell-flagged LACs – all of them built to the latest Manticoran designs, supported the fleet.

Beyond that, a Manticoran-designed (but Rivendell-built) 'Mycroft' system controlled the thousands of system defense pods dispersed around the system. And half of Wes Marrone's Grand Alliance task force – headlined by Haven and Beowulf-flagged squadrons of the wall – had been left back at Rivendell while Marrone had seized both ends of the New Capetown – New Beijing hyper bridge. For any conventional attacker (and anything short of four or five squadrons of Apollo-equipped SD(P)s), attacking the Rivendell system would be suicide. There might be two or three better-defended systems in human space. There certainly were not more than a handful.

"Set a course for the incoming vessels, at our max acceleration. Anyone who can't keep up stays behind." Carroll ordered. The _Asha'man_ class SD(P)s had the latest version of the Grayson inertial compensator, and massed only slightly less than the RMN's _Invictus_ class. Which meant that the rest of his wall of battle, all of his battle cruisers except his one squadron of _Sorceress_-class ships (the Rivendell Navy's name for the Manticoran _Nike_ class), every heavy cruiser built before the end of the first Havenite War, and every single ship in his inventory that had been built for the Solarian League Navy, would be trailing behind him.

"And get to work on figuring out how feed Osgiliath Station's sensor take into our targeting computers." No one mentioned that taking output designed for scientific study and using it for real-time telemetry in combat was not something Dr. Fey's engineering support team was even going to attempt. When the combat version of the Spider-Sense drone rolled out, it would be designed to produce data in the same format as any other alliance recon drone. But no one had even started to design the production combat version of the Spider-Sense drone yet. And Steve Carroll needed that capability in less than half an hour.

_Rivendell System, aboard _MANSTranscendant

The best detector the Mesan Alignment had developed for its spider drive ships had a range of only 1.5 light-seconds. Colin Detweiler's most pessimistic estimate had been that Rivendell had been able to match the performance of their best efforts. After all, the spider drive had been invented by the Alignment, and they knew exactly what to look for. And the best sensors they had developed that scanned normal space for the minute clues spider drive ships with the Alignment's stealth systems left behind would only 'find' a spider ship nearly within energy range, rendering the Manticoran (and allied) advantages in missile combat somewhat irrelevant.

But the system devised by Kara Fey and her team was different. Without the extraordinarily sensitive gravitic sensors Manticore had developed for high-bandwidth FTL communication and its 'Ghost Rider' recon drones, it would have been impossible. It was true that the spider drive did not produce the powerful, unmistakable signature of an impeller wedge, or even the much smaller 'ripples' that FTL communications relied on. But when Dr. Simões had outlined the basic principles by which the spider drive worked, she had been absolutely certain it would produce a gravitic signature of some sort, even if it was faint and easily lost in 'background noise'. And she had been correct.

The sensors in the handful of hand-built 'spider-sense' recon drones watching the approaches to Osgiliath were designed to watch for the tell-tale signature of spider drive. And they could make out that signature from a full light-minute away. That wasn't close to the full powered range of a three-stage MDM, much less the astounding ranges that could be achieved effectively with Apollo fire control and a ballistic phase. But it was longer than the maximum powered range of any conventional missile.

Vice-Admiral Lydia Papnikitas, her junior officers, and her staff, had done this once before. True, they had not had time for anywhere near the intense scouting of the Rivendell system that they had for the attack on Manticore-B that she had commanded. And the reason this attack was being mounted at all was because the too-clever-by-half elves might very well have developed a means of detecting the spider. Because she was by nature a very cautious woman, Papnikitas ordered her fleet to stay at least five light-seconds from any of the recon drones swarming around Osgiliath Station if at all possible. It might not be; any recon drone had far more acceleration than a spider-drive recon drone, let alone a vessel that had to keep humans alive. But she surely had a lot of error margin. Or at least had thought so when Steve Carroll's fleet – or at least the elements that could keep pace with an SD(P) with a Manty compensator at maximum military power – changed course to head directly at her.

"We must have stumbled into an exercise." She said aloud. "But in case we did not, I want all the active defenses ready to activate on my command." The _Leonard Detweiler_ class spider-drive SD(P)s had heavier armor than any other warship known to man, and by a rather greater ratio than the simple tonnage advantage would indicate. And they had very impressive point defense and counter-missile systems as well. But using any of the active defenses would give away their position even to someone who had nothing designed to see spider drive ships. And they did not have sidewalls or an impeller wedge. Which meant that even a conventional battle cruiser could likely do a lot of damage if it could somehow maintain a targeting fix.

They were coming up on release range, though.

"Prepare to fire on my mark." She said.

_Rivendell System, aboard _RNS Rand al'Thor

Commander Arlie Bowman had been Steve Carroll's staff electronics warfare officer since the admiral had returned to active duty. Breaking the position away from Ops had happened after the Rivendell Navy had learned its new allies had done so; after some careful investigation, they had decided to follow suit. And Arlie had, rather unexpectedly, been shifted to that side of things twenty-seven years into his naval career. Of course, changing his job was a minor thing compared the other radical changes that had happened over the last three years; twenty-four years ago, he'd been a lieutenant commander in the Solarian League Navy and ops officer on one of the Rivendell detachment's battle cruisers. He'd been in some harry situations since then, most notably the Battle of Sanderson, but he'd never been asked to do the impossible before.

Fortunately, he'd managed to get Chief Jessica Falk assigned the senior enlisted in his department. For all its flaws, the SLN had been built for centuries on long-service volunteers, both in the officer and enlisted corps. That was inevitable given how few people served in the SLN relative to the enormous population of the League. But what it meant was that the institutional contempt for enlisted that often developed in military forces that were less than first-rate – and Commander Bowman was forced to admit that outside of certain exceptional units, the SLN was that – had never truly been part of the SLN's culture. Which was why Bowman had no trouble at all acknowledging Falk was – at least in a narrow area that was rather important right now – certainly the best programmer he knew, and probably one of the best in any Grand Alliance navy. And it was why he was concentrating on the regular duties of the staff EWO officer, and leaving it to Falk to work miracles.

"Loading the bridging software now, sir." She said. What Falk had cobbled together was nowhere near as optimized as what the engineers attached to Dr. Fey's team would have put together eventually. And quite possibly had side effects she didn't want to think about just now. But since being able to target what was out there might well prevent Osgiliath Station from joining _Hephaestus_, _Vulcan_, _Weyland_, and Blackbird Yard, she didn't worry about it very much.

Besides, it was just then that the Osgiliath Station's bubble sidewall snapped up.

_Rivendell System, aboard _MANSTranscendant

"Fire Plan Cascade." Papnikitas ordered. Over the last twenty minutes, she'd rapidly lost any illusions that the activity around her ships was a coincidence. How well they could see them, or target them, was another matter entirely. She hadn't expected to be discovered at all, but she had prepared for this contingency.

Thirty graser torpedoes shot away from the ten SD(P)s of her task force, all intending to close to nearly conventional missile range before firing a cruiser-grade laser for a solid three seconds. Even SD-grade sidewalls would have trouble standing up to that. What Papnikitas did not know – and could not – was how tough Osgiliath Station's bubble sidewall was. Or what level of anti-missile defenses the station had been equipped with.

The impeller drive missiles in her pods were spread among softer targets. The scores of dispersed building slips clustered around the space station certainly had no sidewalls, no counter-missiles, and no point defenses. Perhaps some of their crews managed to evacuate in time. But none of the dispersed slips would.

And so two CLACs, six _Allomancer_-class SD(P)s, twenty _Nike_-class battle cruisers, sixteen _Dragon_-class heavy cruisers, thirty-six _Saganami-C_ class light cruisers, and the slips they were built in were destroyed in less than a second. And three-quarters of the workers building them went with them.

_Osgiliath Station_

There had not been anything close to enough time to evacuate the station. In fact, any personnel from the dispersed yards that could make it to the station in time had been hastily shuffled aboard. The station's defenses might not hold. But they were certainly better than any place they could reach it the few minutes available.

Dr. Fey and her team tried to concentrate on providing updated data to Admiral Carroll's fleet. They'd missed four of the giant spider-drive ships in their first pass, but they knew all ten were there now. And they had fired some sort of spider-drive weapon at the station.

The Mesan Alignment had never contemplated trying to burn through sidewalls as heavy as the ones that covered the station. The engineers who upgraded the station's defenses, on the other hand, had the Yawata Strike very much on their minds when they did so. So even though they had underestimated the strength of the attack, both in terms of the power of each individual beam and the number that could be brought to bear on a single target, they had come much closer to reality than the Alignment's estimates had. And more importantly, the damage surveys from the Yawata Strike had made it clear many of the targets had been targeted by a high-powered graser for up to three seconds.

Normally, when a missile fired it was too late to do anything effective to stop it; the bomb-pumped lasers destroyed themselves in firing. And few humans could have reacted fast enough to bring point defense lasers to bear before the graser torpedoes burned themselves out. However, Osgiliath Station's point defense computers were programmed to fire at the source of any beam that persisted more than the tiny fraction of a second of a bomb-pumped laser. Less than half a second after thirty graser torpedoes fired on the station, twenty-seven were blasted out of space by point defense lasers. The remaining three were taken out by the second round of fire.

For the most part, the station's sidewall had held. There had been some isolated burn-through, especially from the three torpedoes that survived nearly a full second. And while the station had extremely powerful sidewalls and point defense, it was still a construction and research station, not an orbital fortress. Any burn through did what in other circumstances would have been considered extreme amounts of damage. Indeed, thousands of workers were killed, and millions of Manticoran dollars worth of equipment were destroyed. But Dr. Fey's team and the 'hard' building slips inside the station escaped serious direct damage.

_Rivendell System, aboard _RNS Rand al'Thor

Missiles had streaked out from Steve Carroll's fleet the second Chief Falk's improvised program had allowed data from the Spider-sense drones to be passed to targeting. He had his six SD(P)s roll pods for minutes now, and each fired a quad pattern.

The pod rails in RMN and Grayson SD(P)s had been designed for pods filled with triple-drive, capacitor-powered missiles. Although the missiles and pods had changed considerably since then, those basic dimensions were intact. On the other hand, the Rivendell Navy's first pods had been designed for dual-drive, fusion-powered missiles. Which meant that despite all the variants in size and shapes of pods the RMN had used since deploying its first pod-laying ships of the wall, every one of those pods was too large for the rails of the Rivendell Navy's _Aes Sedai_ class DN(P)s and _Asha'man_ class SD(P)s.

General Dynamics had solved the problem in two ways. The first was a pod that had all the features of the standard RMN 'flat-pack' pod but contained only seven Mark 23 shipkiller missiles instead of eight. Five of the six rails of an _Asha'man_, and four of the five on a late-flight _Aes Sedai_, were filled with those. The second dispensed with the onboard tractor beam and the Apollo control missile – and utilized some space reclaimed from less than perfect alignment of missile dimensions to pod dimensions – to fit in three more shipkillers. The Rivendell Navy's Apollo-capable ships filled a single rail with those pods; its older early-flight _Aes Sedai_ carried them exclusively. But only the _Asha'man_ were in a position to fire. So a thousand and eighty shipkillers and a hundred twenty control missiles raced out at the ten Mesan Alignment Navy ships than no longer had any illusions that they were invisible.

And those missiles were not alone. His six _Sorceress_-class BCs added another 300 Mark 16-Gs to the fray. Twelve _Dragon_-class heavy cruisers added another five hundred and fifty-two. Eighteen _Ranger_-class light cruisers (which the RMN called a _Saganami-C_ class heavy cruiser) added another 720.

A Haven sector SD(P) squadron might well have been able to take the fire of 2652 missiles – the lightest of which had heavier warheads than SLN Trebuchet capital missiles – and suffer little damage, though likely not if a little over a thousand of those missiles had Apollo fire control (which the Mark 23s fired from Steve Carroll's _Asha'man_ did). But those SD(P)s would have had sidewalls, impeller wedges, and a LAC screen providing additional missile defense. And while the _Leonard Detweilers_ had a truly astounding level of armor and on-board missile defense, and the targeting solutions through improvised fire control were far worse than they would have been on an impeller drive target at five times the range, what they had was nowhere near good enough.

Eight of the Mesan warships were completely obliterated. The remaining two were not far from the same.

_Rivendell System, aboard _MANSCasper

The _Ghost_-class frigate had been detailed to remain well behind the attack fleet, and if only by virtue of its much smaller size and lack of offensive weapons to betray itself, it was harder to see. But in truth none of Dr. Fey's Spider-sense drones had passed within their detection range while its spider was in use, and it had been cruising ballistic and minding its sensor drone take. And ready to hyper out and send the self-destruct command to its drones on the first hint that it had been detected.

Still, Commander Martin had been shocked. Intellectually, he had known what was going to happen if somehow a Rivendell SD(P) spotted a _Leonard Detweiler_ outside of energy range. Admiral Papnikitas had no choice but to try to continue to fight with her two crippled ships; allowing her crew or her ships to be captured would remove any pretense that the Alignment was merely a creation of Haven and Manticore's more delusional intelligence officers. He didn't know what Benjamin Detweiler was going to make of this. He suspected he wouldn't like it.

But he hypered out, and ordered a return to Darius as quickly as possible.


	8. Late January, 1925 PD

Here's part II. A week between parts isn't too bad, right?

**Late January, 1925 PD**

_Landing, Manticore_

"The new Sol System ambassador is here, Your Majesty." Queen Elizabeth's secretary reminded her. Professor (and Prime Minister of Torch) du Havel had told her six months ago the way the trend lines were going on Old Earth, but both she and Lord Alexander had been skeptical. She and her government were doing everything in their power to break up the League, but she had never believed the Sol System itself would want out.

"Show her in, of course." She said.

"I suppose we shouldn't have been a surprised as we were by this." Lord Alexander said while they were waiting. "Sol is probably the biggest trade nexus in human space short of us, even without a wormhole junction. Once the major Sol-based trans-stellars decided that the League's policies were costing them a great deal of money, the rest wasn't too hard to follow."

[break]

"… obviously our most pressing concern is regaining access to the wormhole network for Sol-flagged shipping. We want allied junction fee rates, not neutrals, but the current situation has caused an economic recession of varying degrees of severity in most current or very recently former League member systems, and Sol has been hurt more badly than most." Ava Starling, the new Sol System ambassador to Manticore said.

"We can guarantee neutral rates for you right now. Our standing policy is to offer that, minimum, to any system that leaves the League unless we have clear and convincing evidence that its government is deliberately working against our interests. Allied rates are going to be a bit more contentious." Alexander said. "Your military hardware is obsolete, and you didn't acquire that much of it from the SLN anyway. But we're going to have to insist that your people participate in active operations against the remnants of the League and other Mesan proxies."

"If the Prime Minister would allow me to outline our proposal?" Starling waited for him to nod. "Some in my government are sufficiently angry with the League that they would be willing to support military operations against it without anything in return – whether it's due to a personal disagreement with the League government on one point or another, outrage over what's been going on in the Protectorates, or outrage at having to _care_ about events in the Verge. But since our analysts believe neither the League nor the Mesans – wherever they have run to – are likely to move against Sol any time soon, whether we get the 'Solarian Union' up and running or not, we are going to need allied junction fee levels to sign on to your alliance. And the same level of technical assistance you're providing to Beowulf and Rivendell.

"In return, we can make Sol's industrial base available to you. I understand on the civilian side you're still not close to having restored the capacity you lost in the Yawata Strike. And your people are well aware of the work GIT is doing out at Sanderson; we believe their yards in the Sol system can be upgraded to meet your needs as well. It will obviously take some time to finalize the details, but is this a basic framework you can work with?"

"I believe so. Willie?" Queen Elizabeth said.

"It might be a bit of tough sell in some quarters, but I agree."

If all fifteen star nations represented on the Solarian Union declaration did, in fact, create a single star nation soon (and since only a little more than half of those star nations had formally seceded from the League, that was an open question), that sell would get tougher. The 'Harrington doctrine' called for breaking the League into successor that were no larger or more powerful than the Star Empire. And those fifteen systems (and Beowulf) represented what had been the financial, industrial, and commercial heart of the Solarian League. All were among the top 50 systems in human space in per capita GSP, most were among the most heavily populated (though some, like the Centauran Union, were most definitely not). The new star nation certainly would have potential to become the dominant military and economic power in human space, especially after having their base military technology upgraded to Manticoran standards.

But the Star Empire's Prime Minister didn't think it was likely. None of the factors that broke (or would break) the Solarian Union systems out the League came with a drive to military expansion. And any other polities built out of the League core would likely be the same. So while the Union might retain a large, first-rank navy, it was unlikely to attempt to out-build the Star Empire or Haven. Meanwhile, the commercial interests that had largely driven their secession would also dictate remaining on friendly terms with the gatekeepers of the wormhole network. So the Solarian Union was likely to be very dangerous if threatened, but not likely to threaten anyone else if not provoked. And Manticore – and its allies – could live with that.

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Resolute

"Very large hyper footprint just dropped in, ma'am. Make it… one hundred and two SDs, and approximately eighty smaller sources. SLN _Vega_ and _Scientist_ class, almost certainly. Damn, I wish the data rate on our FTL comm was better." Thenuwara's comm officer relayed. Having any FTL comm capability at all was rather more than the rest of the SLN possessed, but the officers of 34th Fleet were well aware of what Manticoran systems were capable of.

"On that vector, it almost has to be Koh, even if the numbers hadn't matched up with the reports from Canton. Tell Rajiv, Jared, and Mikasi that Orchid is a go." It was, after all, the scenario they had practiced defending against for months – and far more often than anything else. Officially, the op force was 'a very heavy force of conventional ships of the wall, with extended range missiles in pods'. Almost every officer and rating serving in Fleet Admiral Indira Thenuwara's 34th Fleet had spent their entire adult life serving in the SLN. Explicitly designing exercises where the SLN was the enemy was not natural to any of them. But they knew that Koh could only be out here for one reason.

Admiral Thenuwara would have preferred to keep her flag on one of the captured Sanderson SD(P)s; in fact, she had done that until she'd learned about Koh. They had their rough edges, but there was no denying they were fundamentally far more capable than her _Vegas_. Training, doctrine, software upgrades, and pods loaded with GIT Mod 9 missiles could make 32 _Vegas_ far more dangerous than anyone unfamiliar with her fleet would think possible, but at the end of the day, the ships she had taken to Sanderson had badly limited missile defenses, limited acceleration rates, and had neither the Manticoran's off-bore firing capability nor were they designed to control large numbers of pod-launched missiles. And the upgrades GIT had produced that could be installed without a shipyard had gone into the Sanderson SD(P)s, not her old-style SDs. But to create the impression she intended to, she needed to be here. For much the same reason, eight electronics warfare drones trailed 'behind' the fleet (relative to Koh's approach) simulating another squadron of _Vegas_. She'd reported losing one squadron to SLN headquarters. She had not reported standing down the eight next most-damaged as well and sending them to the breakers.

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Curie

"Admiral Thenuwara seems to be concentrated in Sanderson VII orbit near the shipyards. Just like you expected, sir." Koh's tactical officer reported.

"That's the only thing of any real value here." The fleet admiral noted. Certainly SLN flag officers who cared much about the citizens of a verge world that had recently fired on SLN warships were few and far between, and whatever other radical notions Indira Thenuwara might have, he was not about to assume she had gone soft. "Continue on approach as planned. And prepare a message chip for Admiral Thenuwara."

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Resolute

"… you will surrender your ships, and transfer all officers above the rank of Lieutenant Commander to holding facilities on my ships, pending trials for treason. You have thirty minutes to comply. Fleet Admiral Koh, out." The message concluded. It was about what Admiral Thenuwara had expected. But she had to play out her part of the script.

"Admiral Koh, the vast majority of the personnel on my ships – including myself – are citizens of systems that have seceded from the League. As such, there are no conceivable grounds to charge us with treason, unless you intend to charge us for resisting an illegal arrest. Fleet Admiral Thenuwara, out." Thenuwara sent, and waited for the light-speed delay. It had always bothered her, but now that she was aware that the Grand Alliance navies, for the most part, could talk over FTL, it bothered her even more.

Unfortunately, she couldn't use her recon LACs as relays. For one, it would let Koh know she _had_ recon LACs with FTL communications capability. And given the rather poor defenses on those LACs, and how few of them she had, it was an advantage she had no intention of throwing away. In fact, she had a conventional battle cruiser-sized fleet auxiliary under construction with docking bays for sixteen LACs. She had no illusions that what she had justified building anything like the massive LAC carriers that even Rivendell had built, but she intended to keep her FTL capability, limited as it was, with her when she returned to Sol. She had heard some interesting things about the Centauran Union's LACs, but she didn't have any of those here.

"I am well of your arrangements with the new Sol System government. Which constitute mutiny under the terms of SLN Code of Conduct." Koh transmitted. That cozy arrangements with system governments and even holding nominal rank in multiple navies at once wasn't standard practice in much of the SLN seemed to escape Koh's notice. It was true that sort of thing had usually happened in Frontier Fleet, and with protectorate systems, not systems weeks removed from being League core worlds, but there was a great deal of precedent. And either Koh did not know the details of her arrangement, or he was being deliberately misleading. It could be either; it depended on how high-level his source was. In fact, unless he'd found a friendly independent vessel to smuggle him information along the Beowulf-Manticore-Lynx-Spindle-Rivendell run, she wasn't at all sure how he could know about that deal. There wasn't time by any other routing she knew of, even if you had the 'streak drive' the Manties talked about. And while he talked, his fleet was drawing ever-more deeply inside Sanderson's hyper limit.

"In fact, the 'arrangement' with the new Sol System Government was entirely contingent upon the SLN threatening to use military force against my command. And as such, I am formally notifying you that we are activating those terms. I – and all the personnel under my command – are informing you that we resign from the SLN effective immediately. And we are accepting commissions or enlistment in the Sol System Navy, also effective immediately. We are also informing you that our vessels have been purchased from the SLN by the Sol System government. Unrelated to any changes in the status of our fleet, General Industries of Terra has formally notified the League that as a Sol-based corporation, the Sol System Navy has first priority to purchase its new construction, and that as such it will be forced to cancel its existing contracts with the SLN. As Sol is not at war with the Solarian League at this time, I would recommend leaving unless you wish to change that status. Thenuwara, out."

Even when she first sailed for Sanderson, Admiral Thenuwara still had hope that it would never come to this point. She had made it her life's work to make sure at least some small part of the Solarian League Navy would be a real fighting navy, one that could survive the storm that she saw coming. That her fleet would have do so in service of something other than the League bothered her more than she wanted to think about, and she knew how rotten at the core the League was. But like most League citizens, her first loyalty was and had always been to her home world. And her fleet's crew was almost entirely drawn from Old Terra and systems she and her staff had thought extremely likely to stand with Sol if and when things fell apart. It wasn't surprising that list completely overlapped with the Centauran declaration signatories. And, although she didn't understand why quite as well as she should have, most of those who were citizens of other systems had given their primary loyalty to her.

The arrangement with the Sol System Navy – essentially creating the Sol System Navy, in fact – was intended to be a temporary one. Prime Minister Diaz was perfectly willing to grant Sol system citizenship to those who needed it if the formation of the Solarian Union did not work out, but the intention was have the most capable fleet in the SLN become the core of the SUN. Which they expected to build up to three or four hundred modern wallers and screen, if they had enough time to build it.

"You might have been willing to let the elves walk off with a Frontier Fleet detachment, but I cannot let you appropriate an entire battle fleet. And I will remind you that I have over a hundred of the wall, and you have forty." Koh said.

"That may be, but my people and I have no intention of surrendering." Thenuwara said. Her fleet was already at battle stations.

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Curie

"Hyper footprint!" Koh's tactical officer reported. "I'm getting 28 SDs – unknown class, but they're at least 8 megatons each. Accelerating at better than our maximum, sir. Nowhere near fast enough to be Manties, though."

"It has to be the ships Thenuwara captured from Sanderson. But where did she get the manpower to run that many SDs?" He asked. He still had a hundred SDs to their sixty-eight, and he had full loads of Cataphracts. The Sanderson SDs couldn't have anything better, or even Thenuwara wouldn't have been able to take them intact.

There wasn't time to think much longer, though. Both fleets fired, and both fired from well outside the maximum powered range of a Cataphract-C. And Koh briefly reflected that what must have been true 18 months ago was not necessarily true today, and that she was standing guard on what had been the most modern shipyard controlled by the SLN.

_Sanderson System, aboard _PSN Brandon IV Sanderson

When Harriet II Sanderson had commanded the ships in Admiral Misaki Oshigiri's task force, the limitations of their Sanderson-built electronics had meant that despite their Mod 7 missiles having a greater powered range than Admiral Thenuwara's Cataphract-Cs (although less than Admiral Michaels' _Callandors_, let alone Rear Admiral Starks' Mark 23s), the SLN ships had a longer effective range if they were willing to utilize ballistic components in their launches. And months of simulated battles where Oshigiri and the rest of Thenuwara's squadron commanders had experimented with the tactical possibilities of the new missiles had convinced them that opening at anything less than the maximum effective range was almost always an error. And it was clear Koh had not learned that lesson.

But it had been eighteen months since that battle. And much of a _Prince of Sanderson_-class SD(P)'s electronics fit could be upgraded in-place without the need to tie up a building slip. Meanwhile, the Princedom's Mod 7 missiles in her pods had been replaced by GIT's Mod 9. Which had two full extended-range drives in a body the same size as the Mod 7, had a redesigned 'baffle' which no longer needed the 'pop-out' trick to create greater physical separation between drive stages, and had upgraded seekers and penaids as well. So her maximum powered range and maximum effective range were very nearly the same.

And she had twenty-eight pod layers, all of which had rolled pods in advance. Each fired a quad pattern of 240 missiles. So nearly seven thousand missiles were in her first salvo, and they had been targeted at only two squadrons of Koh's SDs.

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Curie

"Missile defense plan epsilon." Which was the 'worst-case' emergency plan that he'd barely spent any time in the simulators on. It was intended for a case where Rivendell had lent the traitors a squadron or two. He'd noticed that Thenuwara's pods were firing the same impossible missiles that the former Sanderson ships were – not surprising, they had to have been made here – and that Thenuwara was only firing from the pods she had on tow. So they couldn't manage to stuff those things in a Trebuchet tube. And she couldn't have been towing a lot of pods behind a Vega. He knew exactly how many he could tow, and he didn't see any way Indira Thenuwara could change that.

That, and that the _Vegas_ seemed to have fired a little over half as many missiles per ship as the Sanderson SDs were the only good things he could think of. He was pinned between two fleets with longer-range missiles than he had, and what he'd thought was a two and a half to one numerical advantage seemed to have dropped to rather closer to one and a half to one. Which was not a ratio he'd be comfortable fighting Indira Thenuwara at even if she didn't seem to have other advantages.

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Resolute

It would have been much easier if Koh had no Cataphracts. She would have been able to fire a single salvo and when the damage was cleared, if Koh had any sense, he would surrender. But he could match her range with a ballistic phase, even if the accuracy would be poor, which meant she could not pause the attack to give him time to assess damage. That was small comfort to the spacers of the twenty-four SLN SDs that were knocked of battle in her first wave. Twelve were utterly destroyed, another eight damaged beyond repair, and the final four targeted by her initial attack 'merely' crippled too badly to fight again without months in a shipyard. Forty-five seconds later another two dozen met a similar fate.

The first salvo Koh had launched was nearly as heavy as what had been targeted at him. He'd had pods on tow, and half again as many ships. But his fire was spread among the forty Vega-class SDs his sensors said were in Thenuwara's task force. Nearly one missile in six had been controlled from SDs destroyed by Thenuwara's first salvo, and so were effectively uncontrolled well before they could reach her task force. Another one in five were targeted on the eight electronics warfare drones that had been simulating SDs, and obligingly were 'killed'.

The anti-missile defenses of SLN warships were grossly inadequate, even with the Halo and Aegis systems that both sides had deployed. But Thenuwara's fleet was well aware of that fact. Her SDs and the screen Jared Richt commanded had drilled integrated defense tactics for years. The software that controlled that fleet's automated responses had virtually nothing in common with stock SLN routines. And in truth she had a heavier screen than he did despite having taken less than half as many ships of the wall to Sanderson as Koh had, having insisted on an over-strength screen when she accepted the assignment to attend to matters in the Rivendell sector. 34th Fleet lost four destroyers, six light cruisers, three heavy cruisers, and five battle cruisers in the exchange. It did not lose a single ship of the wall.

And GIT had come up with one more surprise, if Koh chose to continue the engagement. He had already exhausted the pods his ships could tow within their wedges. GIT's latest pod design had copied a design feature from the latest Manticoran pods, and contained a built-in tractor beam. GIT was sure their variant didn't have anywhere near the endurance of the Manticoran version, but a few hours seemed more than sufficient for a pod-based battle. And it meant instead of being able to tow ten or twelve pods inside each of her SD's wedges, she could tow over one hundred.

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Curie

When Koh saw how little damage he'd inflicted, and how much he'd already suffered, he realized that there were, in fact, limits to what he would do for Manpower. "Signal our surrender." He began to order. And then his flag bridge exploded.

_Sanderson System, aboard _SLNS Resolute

Another forty SLN SDs died before Vice-Admiral Jacob Callahan had been able to assert command and order a surrender. 34th Fleet's losses had been far lighter, and mostly confined to her screen, but six of Indira Thenuwara's _Vegas_ could never fight again. Misaki Oshigiri's _Prince of Sandersons_ had been mostly untargeted; Koh's fleet was already down to the Cataphract-Bs in its internal tubes before they'd understood Oshigiri's SD(P)s were the greater threat. If she had any choice in the matter, none of the _Vegas_ would fight again, but avoiding another major battle until enough _Admirals_ came forward to stand down her older ships entirely seemed unlikely.

At least she'd had months to prepare, even if she'd only had the legal fig leaf she'd given Koh for a week. So Callahan and the other nearly three hundred thousand survivors found themselves in an enormous, and hastily-constructed, POW camp on Sanderson. Hardly luxurious, but they were clean, safe, and designed to hold up to twice as many POWs as she'd actually taken. _Gods damn whatever caused that explosion on Koh's bridge._ Neither her task force nor Oshigiri's had fired a single missile at _SLNS Curie_ nor had any of its squadron-mates, but Koh and his flag officers had died just the same.


	9. Epilogue

**Epilogue, March 1925 PD**

_Darius System_

"I suppose there are ways that could have gone worse," Albrecht Detweiler told his son. "But I can't think of any right now."

"Benjamin's people tell me there's no way whatever detection system the elves came up with could possibly have a range of less than ten light-seconds, given their actions. And that's assuming they have more platforms than we think they do and extraordinarily fortunate placement of them prior to our attack. Even figuring on a thirty light-second range credits them with a lot of luck, or extremely good guesses on the probable approach of a spider-based attack. And whatever platform they had was clearly not in a final, designed for combat system; Casper's logs make it clear that something was transmitting to the station over FTL, and the station was talking to the fleet, during the entire battle. About the only good thing we can say is that Papnikitas managed to get her ships so thoroughly shot up that it should be all but impossible to learn anything from them." Colin said. "And we need to find out how that detector of their works. I don't see how they could possibly have built a detector that good without having at least an experimental spider drive themselves."

"And we never thought we would need to counter anyone else's spiders. At least the 'conventional' pod layers are coming along."

"We still can't afford to get into any kind of stand-up fight with Manticore and their allies. Even more so now that Old Terra is on their side."

_Royal Palace, Caemlyn, Princedom of Sanderson_

"Thank you for agreeing to see me." Admiral Thenuwara said.

"I could hardly refuse." The dowager princess said. Harriet II Sanderson had never found speaking to the person who had broken her empire and forced her to abdicate her throne, no matter what the official record said. Harriet II Sanderson wasn't quite under house arrest in her own palace, but it was very close. But she knew who the true power was in her home system. The battle a six weeks ago had made that abundantly clear.

"My fleet and I must return to Sol soon, save for whatever I leave behind to safeguard Sol's interests here. I trust you will have no inclination to make trouble?"

"My son and the government you put in place, excuse me, the government duly elected by the people of Sanderson, will refrain from sending me out to play conquistador. I never wanted to make trouble for Rivendell in the first place, but with Manticoran support they were certain to be more aggressive in moving against 'warlords' than the elves ever would have been on their own. And having seceded from the League yourselves, I cannot think you object to moving against OFS with any seriousness."

"True, though the systems you conquered no more chose to be part of the Princedom than they chose to become League protectorates. But if you truly have no further desire to expand the Princedom's borders, then we have an offer for you."

"What sort of offer?"

"I'm going to leave my nephew here with four _Vegas_, four _Prince of Sandersons_, and few light units for a screen. In my estimation, it will be a while before anyone potentially hostile can send another major battle fleet this way. Certainly the SD(P)s under construction should be complete before that happens, and GIT is likely going to concentrate future production in its main yards back on Sol. In fact, they'll probably sell the yard here back to its original owners."

"At a substantial markup."

"They have added another thirty-two building slips for ships up to 9 megatons, and upgraded everything where it would make a significant difference to first-line Solarian equipment. That is worth quite a bit. But the point is that it's likely that Rivendell and its allies will be willing to permit you a wall of battle if you have no further designs on your neighbors. And you are, royal birth or not, by far the most capable fleet commander available to the Princedom of Sanderson."

"I believe I would be able to hold off any plausible conventional attack, but something like what was used on Rivendell could easily be used here. You believe the same hand moved Fleet Admiral Koh and moved those mystery attackers. And you have none of the elves magic invisible ship detection platforms."

"I think I can arrange for a cruiser squadron with those platforms to be stationed here. Whether they will be in service to Rivendell or some other member of their alliance, I can't say, except that it will not be Sol. The Sol System Navy – or the Solarian Union Navy – is going to be very short on modern hulls for a while even with full technical cooperation with the Manticoran Alliance."

"Then I can agree."

_Rivendell System, at Rivendell Navy Fleet HQ_

"It's looking for a needle in a haystack, ma'am, but we don't have any better leads." Commodore Keeley said, after reading the final report on the Osgiliath Station attack. The losses had been absurdly light compared to the Yawara Strike, but scores of warships under construction, their building slips, and thousands of the people working in them had still been lost.

"A fragment of decrypted log files indicating the ships that attacked us passed through a wormhole junction two weeks before attacking us barely qualifies as a needle, but I agree. We would have spotted anyone coming through the Spindle-Rivendell Bridge or the New Canton-New Beijing bridge, even a spider drive ship. But if we can find where they came out, we might be able to find where they came from." Admiral Michaels said.

"Still, every system between four days and three weeks from Rivendell is a pretty large volume of space."

"It's a lot better than nothing." Michaels said. The Grand Alliance didn't quite have 'nothing' on where the Alignment was hiding, but they did not have much. In fact, tremendous amounts of intelligence resources – field agents, data analysts, and everything in between – were being expended by every member of the Alliance. But nothing conclusive had come of it.

**Alternative Names for Warship Classes Shared Among Grand Alliance Partners**

SD(P): Rivendell _Allomancer_ = Manticoran _Invictus-B_ = Grayson _Harrington II-B_ = Beowulf _Beowulf_ = Havenite _Javier Giscard_

BC: Manticoran _Nike_ = Rivendell _Sorceress_ = Beowulf _Columbia_ = Havenite _Senator _= Grayson _Steadholder Consort_

CA: Rivendell _Dragon_ = Manticoran _Hexapuma_ = Grayson _Armsman_ = Beowulf _Gremlin_

CL: Manticoran _Edward Saganami-C_ (rated as a CA when built) = Grayson _Burleson _(rated as a CA when built) = Rivendell _Ranger_ = Beowulf _Benton_

**Cast of Characters**

Solarian League Navy HQ (Sol)

_Kingsford, Fleet Admiral Winston_ Commander in chief  
_Gweon, Rear Admiral Caswell_ Commander, Economic Analysis division.  
_Thenuwara, Aravind_ retired, former Fleet Admiral. Nominal head of the Thenuwara family. Father of Indira.

SLN Office of Operational Analysis (Sol)

_al-Fanudahi, Captain Daud_  
_Richt, Captaign (jg) Stephanie  
Teague, Captain Irene_  
_Thenuwara, Commander Raina_

Sol System government

_Diaz, Kevin_ Leader, Solarian Independence Party  
_Meyer, Zara_ Diaz' chief of staff  
_Johan_ Leader, Alliance for Freedom  
_Quan_ Leader, One Sol

Solarian League Navy 11th Fleet

_Fleet Admiral Koh_ Commander  
_Vice-Admiral_ _Jacob Callahan_ squadron commander

Solarian League Navy 34th Fleet (Sanderson)

_Oshigiri, Admiral Misaki_ Wall of battle commander, 34th fleet (also 2nd in command)_  
Richt, Admiral Jared _Commander, Frontier Fleet Task Force 1321 (assigned to 34th Fleet)_  
Thenuwara, Vice-Admiral Rajiv_ Squadron commander, assigned to 34th Fleet. Nephew of Indira.  
_Thenuwara, Fleet Admiral Indira_ Fleet Commander  
_Yao, Rear Admiral Wen_ Chief of Staff

Rivendell System

_Bowman, Commander Arlie_ Staff Electronics Warfare Officer, Rivendell Navy Home Fleet_  
Carroll, Admiral Steve_ Commander, Rivendell Navy Home Fleet  
_Falk, Chief Jessica_ – Electronics tech assigned to Commander Bowman  
_Fey, Dr. Kara_ Hyperspace physicist, Chief Researcher, Parker Project  
_Keeley, Commodore Madison_ Chief of staff to Fleet Admiral Michaels_  
Michaels, Fleet Admiral Caitlin_ Commander in Chief, Rivendell Navy

Sanderson System

_Mendoza, Lt. (jg) Andrew_ RMN Intelligence  
_Sanderson, Princess Harriet II_ former monarch, former Vice-Admiral, Princedom of Sanderson Navy  
_Sharp Mind_, treecat attached to Grand Alliance intelligence_  
Xing, Lt. Yuan_ Rivendell Naval Intelligence

Grand Alliance Rivendell Task Force

_Marrone, Admiral Wesley_ Commander (Rivendell Navy)  
_Paris, Commander Rachel_ Captain, _BNS Benton_ (Beowulf Navy)  
_Starks, Vice-Admiral Theodore_ Senior squadron commander, 2nd in command (RMN)

Manticore System

_Starling, Ava_ Sol System ambassador to Manticore

Mesan Alignment

_Detweiller, Albrecht_ Chairman  
_Detweiller, Colin_ Director of Intelligence  
_Martin, Commander Richard_ Mesan Alignment Navy, Captain of MANS _Casper_  
_Papnikitas, Vice-Admiral Lydia_ Mesan Alignment Navy, Commander of Rivendell Strike Force

Centaurian Union of Free Habitats

_Graf, Captain Sharon_ Commander, Centaurian Union Navy Office of Shipbuilding_  
MacNamara, Commodore Eric _Commander in Chief, Centaurian Union Navy

**Concluding Notes**

So this where I'm going to leave the 'Bridge' cycle for a bit. I have a third story in this continuity planned, but I have another story I'd like to finish first.

Anyone who realizes who I am on David Weber's forums might note that despite being a somewhat tireless advocate for the RMN just scrapping their captured SLN SD, Admiral Thenuwara has occasionally used _Vegas_ quite effectively in my fanfic. However, she's (until the very end) part of the Solarian League Navy, and so has access to both the manpower and infrastructure designed to operate the things and she's mostly used them as diversions with lots of missile pods attached against nothing more advanced than the very crude pre-upgrade _Prince of Sanderson_ SD(P)s of the Princedom Navy. And she (and the SLN / Sol System Navy / SUN) are trying to replace the things as fast as possible. Beyond that, she's quite possibly the best fleet tactician that the Solarian League Navy produced in the last century; she can get away with things other people can't. 


	10. Note

The Bridge cycle concludes with Bridge Opening.


End file.
